Happy Pi Day!

Bake accordingly, darlings.

Awesome Nerd News: Meet John Urschel, Chess Player, Mathematician, and NFL Athlete

John Urschel, offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, is one smart cookie.  He's just published a paper entitled "A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector" in the Journal of Computational Mathematics.  Sound mind in a sound body, indeed, mens sana in corpore sano.

Here's the abstract:

In this paper, we develop a cascadic multigrid algorithm for fast computation of the Fiedler vector of a graph Laplacian, namely, the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue. This vector has been found to have applications in fields such as graph partitioning and graph drawing. The algorithm is a purely algebraic approach based on a heavy edge coarsening scheme and pointwise smoothing for refinement. To gain theoretical insight, we also consider the related cascadic multigrid method in the geometric setting for elliptic eigenvalue problems and show its uniform convergence under certain assumptions. Numerical tests are presented for computing the Fiedler vector of several practical graphs, and numerical results show the efficiency and optimality of our proposed cascadic multigrid algorithm.

I have no idea what that means, but I do know how hard it is to get published in a scholarly journal.   Congratulations, John!

Do the Math: 17 Equations That Changed the World

How many do you know?

Celebrate Pi Day!

It's Pi Day!  Here's a fun infographic about this useful and delightfully unruly number:

Treegonometry: The Formula for A Perfectly Trimmed Christmas Tree

Some math students at the University of Sheffield have come up with "treegonometry," formulae and all, and they've made a calculator to help you decorate your tree!

Awesome: The Hexaflexagon!

Nerd News: The Geeky Glory of MIT

A British paper attempts to understand MIT.  I personally love how there is a code of etiquette for pranks and practical jokes.  Seriously, nobody does practical jokes like MIT students.  Oh, as for the nerdy geeky glory, you can get some of that online free.

The 2012 Turing Award

The "Nobel Prize of Computer Science," this year's Turing Award goes to UCLA professor Judea Pearl with the citation "For fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning." 

Kudos, sir!  Aside from his outstanding academic work, Professor Pearl is also the father of Daniel Pearl, and he intends to donate a part of the Turing Prize money to the Daniel Pearl Foundation.

Happy Pi Day

Yep, it's 3.14 -- March 14!  Have fun.  Eat pie!

Meet "the Body Counter"

Everybody knows that infamous statement by Stalin that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.  Via Pseudo-Polymath is this link to Foreign Policy's profile of statistician Patrick Ball.

Nerd Wars: Pi Versus Tau

Place your bets!  The writeup is a hilarious bit of tongue-in-cheek commentary in itself.  Be sure to check out the pro-tau manifesto and the pro-pi manifesto by the respective partisans.  I'm sure this is causing civil wars among mathletes the world over.

Edupunk Nerd News: Khan Academy and History Lessons

I had previously posted on Khan Academy's cool online lessons on science and math.  I still think they're fun introductions to those concepts, and their accessibility is great. I don't, though, recommend Khan's history lessons, what few he has, because it's really hard to do justice to the vast complexities of history with 10-15-minute-long video overviews.  History is fundamentally different from quantitative subjects like physics and math.  Now the National Association of Scholars has an article about just that very thing.  Do read.  For the record, I am not a fan of the "Big History" approach because it sounds as though the actual, particular details of history become subsumed into whatever thematic idea is being "taught" at the moment -- too streamlined, too pretty, too reductive, too prone to skipping things and glossing over others, too open to the deadly possibility of ignoring counter-examples and important outliers.

Edu-Punktastic Nerd News: Khan Academy

Autodidacts, rejoice!  Currently the lessons are mostly on math and science ... but, oh how fun! Their stated goal is to create the world's first completely free virtual school.

Now I can't help myself.  I simply must imagine this exchange:

Q: Where do you go to school? 

A: Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!

Quote of the Day on Government Spending, Debt, and the Innumeracy of Politicians

We rant a lot about the evils of illiteracy.  Yes, illiteracy is bad.  SO IS INNUMERACY.  Here is a suitable quote about the perils of innumeracy mingled with political silliness and general idiocy: 

Government can’t balance a checkbook. They’re idiots. I know finance math. I do it for a living. And when I look at the numbers involved here, (and the interest!) it makes my head swim . . . It doesn’t work. No matter how hard you wish, no matter how hard you hope, no matter how much compassion you can fit in your stupid compassionate heart, no matter how much you happen to like some program that helps somebody do something wonderful… math never lies and interest never sleeps. Caring don’t pay the bills.

The source of that quote is, by the way, also the best tax rant of Tax Day 2011. Read the whole thing.  (Slight language warning!)

Awesome: The Most Psychedelic Images in Science

Wow!

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Oh, I'm just playing with that famous quip about stats.  Messing with data is actually pretty fascinating, especially if you find a statistician who is both enthusiastic and fun, such as Swedish-born Professor Hans Rosling.  Here is a cool video about the field of stats.  Cine-Sib, this one's for you, since we all know how much you love number-crunching!

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable. -- Mark Twain

Nerd Fun: 88 Proofs for the Pythagorean Theorem

Mathematical mayhem!

Forgotten Nerd History: In WWII, Allied Math Nerds Did What Spies Could Not

They figured out the number of tanks that Nazi Germany was producing per month.  Awesome!  Even better: later, the math nerds' estimates were proven almost exactly right.   (They were off by 1 tank per month.)

Mathematical Madness and 3 Birthdays

The odds must be astronomical.

A Calendar Quirk: 10/10/10

Did you notice that today is 10/10/10?  And it's the same whether you go by October 10, 2010, (as in the States) or 10 October, 2010 (in Europe)?  And am I a super-nerd for thinking this is just hilarious?

As for what to do about 10/10/10 -- I know some insane (and bloody-minded) Greenies are obsessing about carbon emission and global warming again, but I'm much more interested in another kind of hotness altogether.  Hmmm, yes.