Weekly Picks

Here are some interesting picks from last week.

On the essayistic side of blogging, bit-player mused on exact probabilities. Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP wrote about the fruitfulness of errors in mathematics.

On the research side of blogging, the statgraphics-vs-infovis debate continued with Flowing Data and Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science looking for common ground while Concrete Nonsense shared some expository comments on positive knots.

Discussions about aspects of the research community could be found at Quomodocumque regarding the  proposed AMS Fellowships and Computational Complexity regarding the massive online Stanford AI course  and its implications for the future of universities. Finally, Nuit Blanche celebrated good discussions on compressive sensing.

On the educator side of blogging, Think, Thank, Thunksent out school kids in search of planets, quite literally while dy/dan applies his 3acts strategy on an obscure geometry problem. Regarding policies, Teaching College Math discussed captioning math videos and the requirements of the ADA law and Blanchetblog used twitter in class and realized the need to discuss online visibility.

On the visual side of blogging, dataisnature wrote about and linked to the work of Max Hattler and Singing Banana made an incredible video — 1024 coin throws to find 10 heads in a row…

Finally some small bites: Xi’an’s Og was pointed to a ridiculous patent, maths.net.au pointed to an excellent Australian project “Mathematicians in Schools” and Walking Randomly turned 4 – – congrats!

If you still don’t have enough, stop by the 41st Math Teachers at Play Carnival at I hope this old train breaks down…

Enjoy!