Weekly Picks

To give Peter a little break, Fred here to serve you our weekly picks this time (keeping up the tradition of being slightly late).

Since Monday I keep thinking about what John D. Cook asked: Have you saved a (mathematical) milliwatt today? Also, after reading this Sony password analysis (via FlowingData), I took a good long look at my own behavior.

On Tuesday there was the most interesting (and shocking) post When Girls Leave Math and What To Do About It at math4love, where back on Monday there was already one nice idea how to make math more accessible (for everyone): by breaking it! Images des mathématiques showed that even in France the numbers for Universities are quite depressing (translation). MathFour contributed to the topic by pointing out that counting isn’t an inherent concept, while over at QED Insight there was a striking appeal for Experience Before Instruction, Examples Before Theorems. Still related, regularize pondered the question of multiple choice. And to round this up, on Saturday at infinigons etc there was a beautiful account of how much it might help to remember the important lessons we learned when we started doing and loving mathematics.

Tuesday was an interesting day also for other reasons: Gil Kalai brought us up to speed on great results from last year and plans for polymath,  xamuel.com showed an example why getting reviews can be great (and how to fight a paradox with another one), and on Travels in a Mathematical World it was pointed out why we all should support the project Relatively Prime.

What else was there last week? You might actually be better off looking at the statistics on mathblogging.org for this, but here are some more findings: Retraction Watch had some follow-up to this story we mentioned last time, Math Fail showed how to spot what your colleagues did over the summer,  The Unapologetic Mathematician gave a nice introduction to the Lie derivative, and on Computational Complexity there was a list of computer scientists that recently found a new (research) position, including an interesting discussion in the comments. Oh, and don’t try to eat with this fork.

Enjoy!

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