Weekly Picks

It’s already Wednesday — time for some picks from last week!

On the research side of blogs, Freakonometrics looked at some old data from “The origin of sex differences in Science” — and finds the difference to be elsewhere (translation). After its epic series on the “crazy Greeks” and their geometry, Gli Studenti Oggi started a new series on how computers calculate logarithms (translation) while Computational Complexity had a guest post (and lots of discussion) from the IT History Society. Finally, Libres pensées d’un mathématicien ordinaire shared a large list of references on Markov Chains and The Geomblog saw some conference blogging via guest-writing students — best practices.

On the teacher side of blogs, Math Mambo decided to not just help, but join a student taking an online course (including fun grief). Misscalcul8 shared a conversation with Marcelle Good on textbooks. Think, Thank, Thunk shared the story of students discoverning the product rule by themselves while Exzuberant embraced Rebecca Black to make statistics a hit. Also, Learning and Teaching Maine handed out the criteria for the upcoming Math&Multimedia Carnival — deadline is Sept 23.

Elsewhere, Richard Wiseman’s Blog re-shared an amazing illusion, The Mathematical Tourist wrote about “Pythagorean Fractal Tree” by Koos Verhoeff and Math For Grownups had to endure a small shitstorm after a book review didn’t get the math right.

Enjoy!