Morality

Apologies for the lack of updates; I’ve been attempting to apply to graduate school. In the meantime, I want to link to a fantastic paper I just heard about by Eugenia Cheng on moral truth in mathematics. In private (or for me, on MathOverflow), mathematicians often say things like “well, morally, this should be true [...]

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Update

Apologies for the lack of posts recently; I’m on Spring Break and trying to relax and get some work done instead of blogging. In other news, Stack Exchange offered me, and I accepted, an applied-mathematics internship with them this summer. (Procrastinating on math.SE finally paid off!) I have learned some interesting things about mathematics education [...]

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Pi is still wrong

In anti-honor of “Pi Day,” I’d like to direct your attention to Michael Hartl’s The Tau Manifesto. The Manifesto is inspired by Bob Palais’ article is wrong! and presents a list of simple, but compelling, reasons that , not , is the more fundamental constant. These ideas have been discussed on the blathosphere before, e.g. [...]

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John Baez interviews Eliezer Yudkowsky

There’s a lot of food for thought in John Baez’s latest post on Azimuth, an interview with AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky. Eliezer Yudkowsky happens to be one of the most interesting people I know of. In addition to his work on friendly AI, he helped found the community blog Less Wrong. The material in his [...]

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The 2010 Fields Medalists

The 2010 Fields Medalists have just been announced! The moment I found their names on Twitter, they were already on the Wikipedia article. Go figure. I am not familiar with any of their names, except that Ngô Bảo Châu’s name was tossed around on the blogosphere awhile back because of his proof of the fundamental [...]

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More random updates

I’ve been reading a lot of mathematics lately, but I don’t feel capable of explaining most of what I’ve been reading about, so I’m not sure what to blog about these days. Fortunately, SPUR will be starting soon, so I’ll start focusing on relevant material for my project eventually. Until then, here are some more [...]

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Random updates

I won’t have time for a substantive update for about a week, so here are some bullet points. Peter Cameron has a blog, which I somehow didn’t know before. Terence Tao and Tim Gowers both have links to it, but the Secret Blogging Seminar doesn’t. Anyway, it’s excellent. I’ve been looking over the course listings [...]

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Textbooks

I recently added two new pages to the blog: a bibliography for listing references I cite on multiple occasions, and a suggestions and requests page. The bibliography is likely to soon contain citations for at least some of the following books which have recently come into my possession: Introduction to the Theory of Computation, Sipser [...]

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Whoops!

I seem to have broken my MaBloWriMo streak. I hope you’ll believe me when I say it was impossible for me to get a post up yesterday. Unfortunately, the rest of this week looks just as hairy (for completely different reasons), so I’m going to have to take a break. Here’s where we’re headed once [...]

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I don’t trust uncountable sets

I have a mathematical confession: I don’t trust uncountable sets. Some time ago on MathOverflow somebody asked what a reasonable definition of “infinite permutation” would be. The first answer that comes to mind is a bijection . The set of all such bijections does form a group, but not only is it uncountably generated, it [...]

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