Archive for December, 2011
From Krugman’s blog today, via Deane Yang’s FB feed: Math is a friend of mine. There have been a number of occasions in my life when doing the math on an economic model has led me to conclusions very different from my preconceptions. But I have always been able, after the fact, to find a [...]
Filed under: economics, language, math | 32 Comments
Tags: formalism, nuh uh, paul krugman
Four Tucson notes
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Filed under: education, food, lists, offhand, politics, travel | 4 Comments
Tags: arizona, cafe poca cosa, ethnic studies, ron paul, rubber stamps, tucson, urban renewal, wig-o-rama
Movies I cried at in 2011
Bridesmaids The Muppets What has become of me? It has something to do with having kids, I think. Some people say “I became a totally different person when my children are born” but for me it’s been almost the opposite. In this one way, though, I’ve changed. Before children I used to be impervious to [...]
Filed under: children, movies, offhand, psychology | 4 Comments
Tags: bridesmaids, muppets, sentimentality
I don’t know mine. I have to look at my card whenever I purchase something online. Why? It seems to me that I type or say my credit card number as much as I type or say my phone number, and I would consider it totally weird not to have my own phone number committed [...]
Filed under: offhand, psychology | 20 Comments
Tags: credit card, memory, numbers, reader survey, telephone
That might seem like a strange question, given that United Wisconsin claims it already has the 500,000+ signatures they need to force a recall election this spring, and are aiming for a million by the end of the 60-day petition period next month. But the Walker-Kleefisch recall isn’t the only one going. Petitions are circulating [...]
Filed under: madison, news, politics | 3 Comments
Tags: elections, pam galloway, recall, recall walker, scott walker, state senate, terry moulton, van wanggard, wisconsin
The LA Review of Books, reviewing Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly’s All Things Shining: It may seem strange for a book about the good life to make such an extended example of Wallace, given that he was famously depressive and hanged himself. No! David Foster Wallace was not famously depressive. Lots of people who read [...]
Filed under: books, psychology | 3 Comments
Tags: all things shining, david foster wallace, depression, dfw, sean kelly
A reporter at the Wisconsin State Journal called me the other day with a really good question. He had heard that pi had been computed to ten trillion decimal places. And he wanted to know: how could you possibly measure a circle that precisely? So how did he know to call me? Because I’m on [...]
Filed under: academia, education, math | 3 Comments
Tags: experts, pi, public relations, uw, wisconsin, wisconsin state journal
A new paper posted this week on the arXiv this week by UW grad students Evan Dummit and Márton Hablicsek answers a question left open in a paper of mine with Richard Oberlin and Terry Tao. Let me explain why I was interested in this question and why I like Evan and Marci’s answer so [...]
Filed under: math | 5 Comments
Tags: additive combinatorics, additive number theory, besicovitch, combinatorics, evan dummit, grad students, harmonic analysis, kakeya, marton hablicsek, richard oberlin, terry tao
We are the 81%
Strange column in the Isthmus this week by conservative columnist Larry Kaufmann, who says people are wrong to think about inequality as a problem when the great purring engine of American productivity is lifting all boats. (Not a mixed metaphor — in the world of this column the engine is so awesomely strong that it [...]
Filed under: bad statistics, economics, madison, politics | 8 Comments
Tags: inequality, isthmus, occupy
In my mail: The Best Writing On Mathematics 2011 (Mircea Pitici, ed.) from Princeton University Press. Just to get this out of the way: I’m in here! They reprinted my compressed sensing article from Wired. You might now be wondering: are there really enough popular math articles published in a given calendar year to fill [...]
Filed under: books, math | 5 Comments
Tags: crowdsourcing, earthball, genius, gowers, massive collaboration, nathanson, pitici, princeton
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