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The New York Times Book of Mathematics
This was an good idea: take a bunch of old (and some recent) news articles on developments in mathematics and related ares from the past hundred years. Fun for the math content and historical/nostalgia value. Relive the four-color theorem, Fermat, fractals, and early computing. I have too much of a technical bent to be the [...]
One more thought on Hoover historian Niall Ferguson’s thing about Keynes being gay and marrying a ballerina and talking about poetry
We had some interesting comments on our recent reflections on Niall Ferguson’s ill-chosen remarks in which he attributed Keynes’s economic views (I don’t actually know exactly what Keyesianism is, but I think a key part is for the government to run surpluses during economic booms and deficits during recessions) to the Keynes being gay and [...]
The Folk Theorem of Statistical Computing
From an email I received the other day: Things are going much better now — it’s interesting, it feels like with both of my models, parameters are slow to converge or get “stuck” and have trouble mixing when the model is somehow misspecified. See here for a statement of the folk theorem.
Jesus historian Niall Ferguson and the improving standards of public discourse
History professor (or, as the news reports call him, “Harvard historian”) Niall Ferguson got in trouble when speaking at a conference of financial advisors. Tom Kostigen reports: Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, [...]
Same-Sex Divorce Stats Lag
As gay-rights advocates push for more states to legalize same-sex marriage, they are also pushing for the right to same-sex divorce. But the stats on this new form of relationship split are lagging.
NYC Data Skeptics Meetup
Rachel Schutt writes: The hype surrounding Big Data and Data Science is at a fever pitch with promises to solve the world’s business and social problems, large and small. How accurate or misleading is this message? How is it helping or damaging people, and which people? What opportunities exist for data nerds and entrepreneurs that [...]
Setting aside the politics, the debate over the new health-care study reveals that we’re moving to a new high standard of statistical journalism
Pointing to this news article by Megan McArdle discussing a recent study of Medicaid recipients, Jonathan Falk writes: Forget the interpretation for a moment, and the political spin, but haven’t we reached an interesting point when a journalist says things like: When you do an RCT with more than 12,000 people in it, and your [...]
Pairing Students
A teacher wants to create several sets of pairs of her students to work together on class projects; over the several sets, each student should be paired with each other student only once. For instance, with four students, there are three sets of pairings: {Anne, Beth}, {Chet, Dirk} {Anne, Chet}, {Beth, Dirk} {Anne, Dirk}, {Beth, [...]
Culture clash
I had no idea this sort of thing even existed: I’m reminded of our discussion of Charles Murray’s recent book on social divisions among Americans. Murray talked about differences between upper and lower class, but I thought he was really talking more about differences between liberals and conservatives among the elite. (More discussion here.) In [...]
Quasirandom groups and a cheap version of the Brauer-Fowler theorem
Suppose that is a finite group of even order, thus is a multiple of two. By Cauchy’s theorem, this implies that contains an involution: an element in of order two. (Indeed, if no such involution existed, then would be partitioned into doubletons together with the identity, so that would be odd, a contradiction.) Of course, [...]
7 ways to separate errors from statistics
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have been inspired by the recent Reinhardt and Rogoff debacle to list “six ways to separate lies from statistics” in economics research: 1. “Focus on how robust a finding is, meaning that different ways of looking at the evidence point to the same conclusion.” 2. Don’t confuse statistical with practical [...]
The Gravitational Force of Rubbish
Imagine, for just a moment, that you were one a group of scientists that had proven the most important, the most profound, the most utterly amazing scientific discovery of all time. Where would you publish it? Maybe Nature? Science? Or maybe you'd prefer to go open-access, and go with PLOS ONE? Or more mainstream, and [...]
A graph at war with its caption. Also, how to visualize the same numbers without giving the display a misleading causal feel?
Kaiser Fung discusses the following graph that is captioned, “A study of 54 nations–ranked below–found that those with more progressive tax rates had happier citizens, on average.” As Kaiser writes, “from a purely graphical perspective, the chart is well executed... they have 54 points, and the chart still doesn’t look too crammed [...]
Conference videos
Well, from my perspective at least, the conference was a success. We all made it through in one piece, and no one got trapped on the subway. If any of you are looking for the videos of the talks, they can be downloaded from this page. That’s a only a temporary hosting solution, but at [...]
How Does Applied Math Impact Foundations?
This weekend I'm giving a talk on "The Foundations of Applied Mathematics". It's mostly about how the widespread use of diagrams in engineering, biology, and the like may force us to think about math in new ways, at least...
“Tragedy of the science-communication commons”
I’ve earlier written that science is science communication—that is, the act of communicating scientific ideas and findings to ourselves and others is itself a central part of science. My point was to push against a conventional separation between the act of science and the act of communication, the idea that science is done by scientists [...]
First Unrepeated Character In A String
We have today another exercise from our never-ending supply of interview questions: Given a string, find the first character that appears only once in the string. For instance, given the string “aabbcddd”, the first character that appears only once is the “c” found at the 4th character in the string, counting from 0. Be sure [...]
Giving credit where due
Gregg Easterbrook may not always be on the ball, but I 100% endorse the last section of his recent column (scroll down to “Absurd Specificity Watch”). Earlier in the column, Easterbrook has a plug for Tim Tebow. I’d forgotten about Tim Tebow.
The Great Race
This post is by Phil. Last summer my wife and took a 3.5-month vacation that included a wide range of activities. When I got back, people would ask “what were the highlights or your trip?”, and I was somewhat at a loss: we had done so many things that were so different, many of which [...]
Andrei Zelevinsky 1/30/1953 – 4/10/2013
Andrei Zelevinsky 1/30/1953 – 4/10/2013
