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.

Let’s kick off with some posts that showcase that mathematics is all around us: Quomodocumque was at Music Hack Day, looking for the rules of melody — Fantastic! Intersections — Poetry with Mathematics quotes a poem by Sarah Glaz incorporating the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic. And of course the calender sparked a lot of posts, our personal favorite being the one of Freakonometrics (translation).

There are a lot of bloggers using GeoGebra for visualizations, and we never found the right spot to mention them. So here’s an example for you: Gaussianos with a beautiful post on cycloids, astroids and other curves generated by movement  (translation).

Moving on, the Renaissance Mathematicus wrote about the difficulty of calling somebody an inventor in a historically accurate way, Computational Complexity gave a short introduction to bitcoins, Azimuth had a guest post on measuring bio diversity, and Casting Out Nines explains that math is not too hard for university students, it’s just the wrong kind of hard.

On the research-side of blogging, Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP proposes a topic for a new polymath project, Gil Kalai starts a new series on expanders, Low Dimensional Topology asks when you should care about a conjecture, and Libres pensées d’un mathématicien ordinaire tells us about some favourite sets of matrices.

On the educator-blogs, Angrymath wants to reasonably discuss 1=0.999… in the classroom, and Math 4 Love proposes a nice puzzle that is similar to the Collatz Conjecture (but easier), with a follow-up.

Finally, if you were interested in the debates about mathematical publishing, here are two more contributions: Nuit Blanche senses the end of the peer-review bubble and A CS Professor’s Blog brings a radical idea to the table: you should submit other people’s work instead of your own.

 Enjoy!