Weekly Picks

Well, it’s almost still Monday Tuesday. Time for last week’s picks.

The week started off nice and easy with mathalicious ranting elegantly countering a NYT op-ed on teaching effectiveness as a function of time. The first bang came Tuesday when Shetl-Optimized published a piece on a recent New Yorker article about quantum computing — a must this week!

Wednesday still moved slowly but was helped along when Statistical Modeling, Causal Interference, and Social Science discussed some of the ethical aspects of the field while Math Prize For Girls gave an important shout-out to the winners of the Canadian Math Olympiad — congrats!

Almost-Friday sped things up, though. First, dy/dan did one of his crazy stunts: he relied on live twitter activity while giving a presentation — fantastic! –, some comic relief (of the the-laugh-dies-on-your-lips kind) was achieved by Random Walks pointing out some less known (or rather, less openly discussed) proof techniques and Freakonometrics declaring the presidential elections in the US to be already decided, by height. To top everything, Bubbles Bad; Ripples Good starts a new series on the decay of waves with an absolutely brilliant introduction.

Friday saw some interesting discussions, one at Gaussianos on an arXiv paper with the latest ” Marvelous Proof of FLT” (translation) and one at Gödel’s Lost Letter and  P=NP on navigating cities — and proofs. Shorter but no less worthwhile was Math Jokes 4 Mathy Folk writing about the MathCounts National Competition and Frank Morgan remembering Herbert Federer.

On the weekend The Renaissance Mathematicus remembered a “Gallic Newtonian’s” 298’s birthday while Mathematics under the Microscope wondered why mathematicians can’t learn from chemists for once. To end the week, Mr Honner created Sierpinski-reliefs in the sand (rather poetic methinks) and Tanya Khovanova’s Blog discussed math research projects for high school students.

Wow, what a week of wonderful posts. We hope you enjoy them, too!