Archive for March, 2010
Author photos
Books used to have more awesome author photos than they do now.
Filed under: books, nostalgia, offhand | 2 Comments
Tags: headshots, photography
Fritz Grunewald, RIP
Fritz Grunewald died unexpectedly this week, just before his 61st birthday. I never met him but have always been an admirer of his work, and I’d been meaning to post about his lovely paper with Lubotzky, “Linear representations of the automorphism group of the free group.” I’m sorry it takes such a sad event to [...]
Filed under: math | 2 Comments
Tags: fritz grunewald, group theory, grunewald, lubotzky, topology
Pinch run, grand slam
From Baseball-Reference Stat of the Day, the 17 times in baseball history a player has entered the game as a pinch runner and hit a grand slam. Three of these were Orioles: David Segui, John Shelby, and Chris Hoiles. That’s right, Chris Hoiles pinch ran! Chris Hoiles was 5 for 12 lifetime as a base [...]
Filed under: baseball, orioles | Leave a Comment
Tags: chris hoiles, pinch runner, sam horn, slowness
Earth-M bracketology
What if every game in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament were won by the school with the better math department? A group of us put together the alternate-universe bracket above to find out. Note that the rules of the game forbade us from looking up anything on the Internet, so there are doubtless some matchups [...]
Filed under: math, offhand | 17 Comments
Tags: absurd counterfactuals, basketball, bracket, ncaa
At least that’s how I felt as a kid, when every visit here included a trip to Green Acres or Magic Carpet. Miniature golf courses are just bigger and better and awesomer here than anywhere else. Today I took CJ to Golf n Stuff, where they not only have a solid golf course but go-carts, [...]
Filed under: cj, travel | 2 Comments
Tags: arizona, awesomeness, bumper boats, have at thee, miniature golf, tucson
Kids aw hawd to ustan
CJ, like most kids his age, pronounces “r” as “w.” I was investigating this a bit and found the following interesting page which lists the various phonological shifts young kids undergo as they learn to speak. A lot of these are things CJ does and which I’d never consciously noticed! (e.g. “weak syllable deletion”, in [...]
Filed under: books, children, cj, language, psychology | 6 Comments
Tags: gliding of liquids, linguistics, paul theroux, phonemes, phonetics, the mosquito coast
Recommendation inflation
The paper submitted by ***** bears conclusive evidence of the profound and penetrating studies of the author in the area to which the topic dealt with belongs, of a diligent, genuinely mathematical spirit of research, and of a laudable and productive independence. The work is concise and, in part, even elegant: yet the majority of [...]
Filed under: academia, math, offhand | Leave a Comment
Tags: gauss, recommendations, riemann
March math link dump
If blood found at a crime scene contains a series of genetic markers found in about 1 in a million people, and if you search a database of genetic material from 300,000 people and find just one match, person X, for the blood at the scene, what is the probability that person X is innocent [...]
Filed under: bad statistics, lists, magazines, math, politics, teaching | 5 Comments
Tags: fashion, pedagogy, probability, prosecutor's fallacy, thurston
Fun week coming up: Gunnar Carlsson of Stanford will be giving this semester’s Distinguished Lecture Series at Wisconsin. The talks: Monday, March 8 and Tuesday, March 9, 4pm, Van Vleck B239: “Topology and Data” There is a growing need for mathematical methodologies which can provide understanding of high dimensional data sets. These methods also need [...]
Filed under: madison, math | 2 Comments
Tags: gunnar carlsson, lectures, statistics, talks, topology
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