Synchronicity
The other day, I took the time to read S. Yegge's latest essay on software, complex systems, and consciousness; the thesis of the work, an idea that Steve has been refining for some time now, is that...
View ArticleNon-orientable garments
Every mathematician worth their salt knows of The Acme Klein Bottle Company, although I'm one of the few I know who has made a purchase there; specifically, a question mark as a wedding gift to the...
View ArticleLet the CHI flow
For the purposes of this post, that's Computer-Human Interaction, not the Chinese concept of life force.I made my way to PARC again last Thursday to hear a great talk about how the landscape of...
View ArticleShaken to the (multi) core
Catherine Crawford, chief architect for next-generation systems software at IBM Systems Group's Quasar Design Center, has made a bold statement about the future of software; as is to be expected, some...
View ArticleI thought this one goes up to eleven
One of the more intelligent sorts of mathematical questions I've been asked are those on the nature of higher dimensions. Somewhere in our pop history it was decided that since we lived in the third...
View ArticleOver my head
I looked up, stretching my neck, and saw this lovely ornament hanging above my cubicle.
View ArticleHyperbolic frolic
I had the tremendous pleasure today to attend an exhibit of works by M. C. Escher in my hometown. It was an incredible treat to see so many familiar images, a few of which have adorned my walls, in one...
View ArticleGang sines
R. Stevens models his forthcoming design, featuring both a transcendental number and an earthly delight:With right thumb and left ring finger extended, he'd be repping the circle with proper digits.
View ArticleWould it help if I drew a flow chart?
Such great things come out of MIT's media lab: one of their visitors has built a water-based computer.This could come in handy in the event of a massive electromagnetic pulse. However, I suspect most...
View ArticleBuild character!
A few research institutions and news outlets, as well as some blogs have reported on what is generally being termed the "mapping" of E8. This is about as good a layman's description of this result as...
View ArticleI'm a bad geek
Unlike last year, I did absolutely nothing to celebrate π day this year. I can at least send out a post facto link to the (boing)2-ing of Stanford's L. E. O'Neal.I still prefer my proposed finger-play....
View ArticleI've received a variety of junk messages ...
which is not ideal. I recently found a message labeled as spam with "On nullstellensatz" as its subject. This isn't the only time a math term has turned up in this context–earlier today I was treated...
View ArticleE8, AIM, and PR
I was very happy to hear the voice of M. Vazirani, who served on my dissertation committee (see the evidence below) on last week's episode of KQED's California Report. It's a great little piece,...
View ArticleIt is finished
My adviser, A. Schilling, has just finished a paper extending my first result, proving my conjecture on the matter and thereby tying up the last loose end left by my thesis.
View ArticleDelinquency
For those distraught by the dearth of mathematically themed writings in this space, may I suggest my shared items in Google Reader, easily accessed either by the first of the above links, or in the...
View ArticleOn the rise
As a counterpoint to his miserable formula from a year ago, R. Stevens gives a metric for quality of life.I'm very happy to have had both input variables move in the right direction recently. More...
View ArticleLet T be a shirt...
I used to think I needed this shirt.Now I realize that I need this one.LOL rights reserved the respective creators, images used with their respective (implicit) permissions.
View ArticleContinuous and discrete
This photo is more than two years old. You can tell because in spite of the huge grin on my face, the crow's feet near my eyes are still relatively small.Thanks to C. Dewey for finally getting around...
View ArticleAm I fascinated by scale because I'm a Libra?
One of the greatest gifts given us by mathematics is a language for scale. It's how we know that 1,000 is different from 1, which is in turn different from 0.1.One of my earlier memories is of...
View ArticleKalil Azad's Mathematical Mindset
Thanks to the increasingly hive-like mind of 43 folders, I landed on this essay about how to think about math on Kalil Azad's excellent BetterExplained. (As we are now in the midst of the era of humees...
View Articleif (next == NULL) read(other_blogs);
I‘m officially admitting to myself and the world that this is the final post to Discreet Math. I do, however, have this twitter feed, and this ripular blog that I run with tumblr. Both have rss feeds,...
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