Ars Mathematica

I’ve invited frequent commenter PeterMcB to guest post on Ars Math.

The latest issue of the Bulletin of the AMS of now available (though most of the articles have been available online for a while).

Something that’s always annoyed me is the story about how scientists have shown that bumblebees can’t fly. Everytime I hear the story, it’s always told with the same “stupid scientists” tone.

I see, via Cosmic Variance that scientists have finally found out how they manage the trick. (Interestingly, someone in the comments suggests that the original research showed not that bumblebees couldn’t fly, but that they couldn’t glide, which in fact they can’t.)

I’ve learned to take all media articles about internet phenomena with a grain of salt, but this article from news.com, Growing Pains for Wikipedia, claims that Wikipedia is changing its policy so that anonymous users cannot create new pages (they can still edit existing pages). While practically speaking it’s a small change, it’s a big change in Wikipedia philosophy. The online encyclopedia has always prided itself in the ability of anyone to edit, with the notion that making participation as easy as possible will attract more and higher quality editing.

Eric Schechter’s Handbook of Analysis and Its Foundations has a cool quote from constructivist mathematician Errett Bishop:

Mathematics belongs to man, not to God. We are not interested in properties of the positive integers that have no descriptive meaning for finite man. When a man proves a positive integer to exist, he should show how to find it. If God has mathematics of his own that needs to be done, let him do it himself.

The AMS has been posting articles for the next issue of the Bulletin of the AMS as they arrive. One recent arrival is New methods in celestial mechanics and mission design by Marsden and Ross, which provides a pretty good introduction to the latest developments in celestial mechanics — still a difficult subject after so many centuries.