What experimental math taught me about my intuition

31May11

The project I’m working on with David Brown and Bryden Cais is the first thing I’ve ever done involving computational experiments as a serious part of the development of the ideas.  We’re trying to formulate a reasonable conjecture about the limiting distribution of some arithmetic objects, and I thought we’d arrived at a pretty good [...]

Filed under: math   |  5 Comments
Tags: experimental math, intuition

Franzen blows a joke

29May11

Given the weirdly ambivalent best-friendship between Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, it’s sort of a strange choice to invite Franzen to give this year’s Kenyon College commencement address, the 2005 edition of which seems destined to be the essay of Wallace’s that stands in the popular imagination as a portrait of the man himself.  [...]

Filed under: college, writing   |  4 Comments
Tags: birds, commencement, david foster wallace, dfw, jokes, jonathan franzen

Philosophy is about craziness

22May11

From John Holbo at Crooked Timber, writing about Green Lantern and philosophy: Philosophy really is, substantially, about craziness and the peculiarly stable attraction of absurd and apparently stupid ideas and attitudes. I was surprised to find that I sort of agree with this provocative claim.  I like academic philosophy a lot — particularly that strange [...]

Filed under: offhand, philosophy   |  3 Comments

How good is Zach Britton?

19May11

The Orioles blew another game against the Yankees last night, but rookie Zach Britton was brilliant again, scattering 6 hits over 7 innings and allowing only one run, that unearned.  His ERA of 2.14 is 5th best in the American League, and he has the 3rd highest WAR among AL pitchers.  In the talk about [...]

Filed under: baseball, orioles   |  4 Comments
Tags: home runs, mariano rivera, sabermetrics, zach britton

Maples on Cohen-Lenstra for matrices with iid entries

14May11

Emmanuel Kowalski pointed me to a very interesting recent paper by Kenneth Maples, a grad student at UCLA working under Terry Tao.  One heuristic justification for the Cohen-Lenstra conjectures, due to Friedman and Washington, relies on the remarkable fact that if M is a random nxn matrix in M_n(Z_p), the distribution of coker(M) among finite [...]

Filed under: math   |  2 Comments
Tags: cohen-lenstra, maples, random matrices, random matrix

Future “women in math” threads: a request

14May11

The comments on yesterday’s post turned into another boring “feminism sux / feminism roolz” thread.  I get it — some people think it’s worth thinking about gender issues in math, some people don’t, people are going to have that discussion.  Fine. My request:  if you are going to comment on a “women in math,” thread, [...]

Filed under: blog, politics   |  5 Comments
Tags: comments, dander, sorry if this seems peevish

You must not act surprised when I inform you that dysfunctional relationship is a product of today

13May11

Writing a talk about stable cohomology and listening to my “Unplayed” playlist on iTunes, as one does.  Encountered a much-beloved and almost-forgotten piece of collegiana:  “Dysfunctional Relationship,” by Consolidated.  Glum radical politics over beats and scratches, somehow wooden and charming at once.   Was there ever another dance track that asked the backup vocalists to [...]

Filed under: music, nostalgia, offhand   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: consolidated, dysfunctional, video

Why Laba is not on Math Overflow

13May11

A thoughtful post from harmonic analyst Izabella Laba about why she isn’t participating in Math Overflow (and, by extension, why other women in math might not be.)  The comments are good too.

Filed under: math   |  31 Comments
Tags: laba, math overflow, women in math, women in science

Stop me before I evoke again!

09May11

From Chris Rickert in Saturday’s Wisconsin State Journal, writing on Sun Prairie’s denial of a land use license to the town mosque: It’s not often you encounter a business park condominium association and Friday call to prayers in the same context. The first is pure ex-urban Americana, evoking images of identically nondescript buildings, large parking [...]

Filed under: madison, news, offhand   |  2 Comments
Tags: evoke, mosque, wsj

Reader survey: have you ever clicked on a Facebook ad?

08May11

Apparently Facebook is said by some to be valued at $75 billion.  Facebook’s revenue, just under $2b last year, derives mostly from online ads. I visit Facebook most days and was only dimly aware that it had ads.  I just looked, and yes, they’re there:  not on the main newsfeed page, but on my profile [...]

Filed under: commerce, offhand   |  20 Comments
Tags: advertising, facebook, reader survey