Mathblogging.org Weekly Picks

We try to read every blog post that goes through Mathblogging.org. For the Weekly Picks, we collect posts from last week that give you an impression of what the mathematical blogosphere has to offer.

{A few more posts than usual since we didn’t post last week.}

Community

• The Accidental Mathematician offers insight into the amount of administrative work of a full professor.
• A CS Professor enjoys 5 minute presentations by job-seekers at ICTS.
• Nuit Blanche writes on open access and open data.
• Doron Zeilberger remembers Herbert Wilf.
• Frank Morgan’s Blog collects resources for undergraduate research opportunities.
• Piece of Mind explores more evidence that the criticism of NSERC’s policy changes is shared by communities other than the mathematical one.
• Last but not least, Timothy Gowers announces not contribute to Elsevier journals in any way.

Art, Essays etc.

• Rhapsody in Numbers creates a fractal for the Collatz 3n+1 problem (which was picked up by Gaussianos, translation).
• Mr. Palomar explains cellular automata’s chess of life (translation).
• Out of the Norm gets from boarding planes to pigeon holes.
• Intersections shares Maurice Kendall’s poem Hiawatha Designs an Experiment.
• travels in a mathematical world improves Ian Stewarts’ The Guardian list of popular mathematics books by crowdsourcing.
• matheminutes brings chaos to your calculator — with bifurcation and all.
• Second Rate Minds is annoyed by hot light bulbs and other puzzles.

Education

• Angles of Reflection takes on the big one: grades.
• Piece of Mind introduces Small Number and the efforts to communicate mathematics better to First Nation students.
• Diary of a maths teacher discusses why society needs to change how it views math and why we should dare to bring (true) math into the classroom
• Republic of Math shares nice example for (true) mathematics that can be done in the classroom.
• dy/dan shares a transcript of a panel discussion with Keith Devlin, Karim Ani and Dan Meyer himself.
• Musing Mathematically coins the term “atomic skills”, important for understanding, but are uninteresting on their own
• Il piccolo Friedrich shares a personal story of becoming a teacher and a great example of how to present difficult material in the classroom (translation).

Research

• The preprint on the minimal number of hints necessary for a sudoku has been picked up Maurizio Codogno (translation) and the mathematical approach is sketched out at Rhapsody in Numbers.
• Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science asks for input regarding issues in the ethics and statistics.
• M-Phi explains the elementary philosophical resolutions of paradoxes.
• Xi’an’s Og is still Bayesian even if Stephen Senn thinks otherwise.

Shorts

• neverendingbooks combines a 48 posts into an ebook Monsters and Moonshine.

Enjoy!