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Aaronson is an asshole? Tell me more! This is the kind of scuttlebutt I'm really looking for here.

He wrongly threw my former advisor under the bus. It still pisses me off.

no wait! tell us more about information theory's vast and complex framework

LOL. This is what happens when I drink a bottle of wine before posting.

i am serious!

ok good to know! I really like his work (& er know someone who has to write about it) so I like to know about who I'm going to laud

i've heard a few explanations of how you can look at quantum stuff not just as a generalization of probability, but even more basically of logic. you just do the right sort of algebraic setup and let your variables "vary" over a different, weirder domain.

Anyone read any of this guy's stuff? http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/03/numbers-guy

it's great. i know some of his work with his students on the munduruku (sp?) re their grasp of small numbers and then another category for "bigger than small" rather than more different numbers. So like 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 big

Also the tribe people get a diff number concept just from learning in schools taught in European languages.

Thanks. Wonder if it's worth reading his number sense book, or any of the others.

Number Sense is the famous one. could just look for articles on the net if you want a sample before buying

http://webmuseum.mit.edu/detail.php?t=exhibitions&type=exh&f=&s=3&record=6

Grothendieck is dead.

RIP :(

Thought revive would be for tomorrow's anniversary of Euler's formula V - E + F = 2.

RIP BIG G

Grothendiecks to watch out for

http://inference-review.com/article/a-country-known-only-by-name

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/da/Icosian_grid_small_with_labels2.svg/500px-Icosian_grid_small_with_labels2.svg.png

Been reading Four Colors Suffice: How the Map Problem was Solved, by Robin J. Wilson, which is very well done, informative and entertaining. If you don't believe me, there is a rave review by John H. Conway on the back.

Here is a related cheat sheet: http://www.mei.org.uk/files/conference07/A2.pdf

Here is review in the AMS: http://www.ams.org/notices/200402/rev-toft.pdf

Also dipping into related book: Euler's Gem: The Polyhedron Formula and the Birth of Topology
By David S. Richeson

Related article:
The Truth about Königsberg, by Brian Hopkins and Robin J. Wilson
http://www.maa.org/programs/maa-awards/writing-awards/the-truth-about-konigsberg
http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/22/Polya/hopkins.pdf

Kuratowski's original paper, in French, on a Polish website: http://matwbn.icm.edu.pl/ksiazki/fm/fm15/fm15126.pdf

A translation and helpful introduction can be found in Graph Theory 1736-1936, by Norman L. Biggs, E. Keith Lloyd, and Robin J. Wilson.

In which they explain that "gauche" translates to "non-planar."

OK, found a good Dover book on graph theory, if anyone is interested. Has a lot of nice biographical background stuff in addition to the mathematical content, which historical material also includes some relevant graphs with names of mathematicians and scientists in them. Just learned Einstein's Erdös number from one of these latter.

http://math.oregonstate.edu/bridge/papers/

http://education.lms.ac.uk/2014/12/alexander-grothendieck-some-recollections/

attn euler in particular: are you familiar with rodin and with "axiomatic method and category theory" (http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1478) and do you have any opinions w/r/t such?

hah I know rodin extremely well! both as a person and as a scholar. he's a category theory partisan, but he knows lots of other math too, and some philo as well. I haven't read the book though. I think it just appeared with springer?

Enigma:The Movie means Enigma:The Book is back in print. It seems to have been out of since the first run, thirty some odd years ago.

u guys ever watch those Geometry Center videos? i was introduced to them during my self-ban. easily the best thing ever created

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGLPbSMxSUM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gLNlC_hQ3M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO61D9x6lNY

Guess it actually came out again in 2012 for Turing centennary. (xp to self)

flopson otm

Will check those out, thx

need part 2 of knot not

ya wtf fuck you bbc worldwide

you could hit this guy up i guess http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/video/AKPeters.html

http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781568814537

$1/minute

my best friend who made me love math got accepted to stanford math phd, super proud. he's a major genius and has an amazing gift for explaining the simple mindblowing idea at the heart of a complex topic. gonna miss him as i live really far from cali but still

^like

did vahid go to stanf?

No idea

not really ... vahid got a masters in education and did his teaching credential at stanford, his undergrad was at cal and that was in physical chemistry, not math ...

vahid is actually a math dilettante!

he totally quit ILX though because IRL people were stalking him on ILX!

ya i knew they hadn't studied math. caltucky is siiick though

LOL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%E2%80%93Zucker_machine

relatedly, was pleased to learn that a subfield of modern algebraic geometry is concerned with mixed motives

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motive_(algebraic_geometry)#Mixed_motives

oh vis a vis the prior link i believe its been confirmed that they decided to write a paper together on something on the basis of their names

A nice long article on Yitang Zhang from the New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/pursuit-beauty

Nice, thanks.

something i have long wondered: why do we think of numbers as being ordered left to right?

Humans represent numbers along a mental number line (MNL), where smaller values are located on the left and larger on the right. The origin of the MNL and its connections with cultural experience are unclear: Pre-verbal infants and nonhuman species master a variety of numerical abilities, supporting the existence of evolutionary ancient precursor systems. In our experiments, 3-day-old domestic chicks, once familiarized with a target number (5), spontaneously associated a smaller number (2) with the left space and a larger number (8) with the right space. The same number (8), though, was associated with the left space when the target number was 20. Similarly to humans, chicks associate smaller numbers with the left space and larger numbers with the right space.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6221/534.full