Weekly Picks

Last weeks picks are running a little late — the new pile of great posts from this week is already daunting, time to get last week’s picks out there, quick and dirty.

Monday was incredibly rich: sketches of topology had some amazing eye candy for us, republic of math discussed (and ranted a little) about the future of mathematical textbooks, Computational Complexity mentioned the funniest voting system, the accidental mathematician explained why she isn’t on mathoverflow (and check the comments!) and Peter Cameron wrote a wonderful piece on dimensionality.

Tuesday wasn’t much less intense. At the AMS grad student blog, Tom Wright gave advice for campus interviews at grad schools, punk rock OR explained what OR teaches you about having a baby, Terry Tao posted an exemplary erratum on a paper, Women in mathematics (in Berlin) studied websites of fellow BMS grad students and James Colliander reminded us of Vannevar Bush.

Wednesday, Psychology and Statistics informed us how to ask Jeromy a statistics question — including a perfect how-to for stats.stackexchange that can serve just as well for mathoverflow (why has nobody wrote one before?).

On Thursday, Tany Khovanova raised the question whether we’re loosing female mathematicians, and, on a lighter note, Michael Trick appealed to the appeal of sports and OR.

Friday saw Vi Hart giving us a binary hand dance and an amazing April fools video posted at Math4Love.

Saturday, MathLog celebrated Max Ernst’s 120th birthday (translation), rudi matematici enjoyed explaining math awareness month in the US (translation) and everybody could congratulate Ask a Mathematician / Ask a Physicst to their 100.000 page views per month!

On Sunday, Xian’s Og gave us a piece on the memorial for Julian Besag.

Amazing writers are out there. Thank you very much.