Ars Mathematica

For readers in the UK, the London Mathematical Society (LMS) is offering two lectures on popular mathematics in London and Birmingham this summer.   

The AMS has a new page devoted to mathematics and art.

Eagle-eyed Peter Woit spotted an interesting volume on AMS Books Online: a collection of survey articles called Mathematics into the Twenty-First Century. The papers were originally presented at a conference in 1988 held in honor of the AMS’ 100th anniversary. Collectively they provide a picture of the frontier of mathematical research.

AMS Books Online has also added a three-volume history of American mathematics to its General interest section.

Frequent commenter Kenny Easwaran (who also has a weblog, Antimeta, devoted to philosophy of math) has written several interesting essays on the interpretation of conditional probability:

• What Conditional Probability Must (Almost) Be
• Two Analyses of Conditional Probability in Terms of Unconditional

The question is practically and philosophically interesting in the case that the event you are conditioning on occurs with probability zero.

I wanted to give the philosphers in our audience a chance to patronize me for my ignorance. I had no idea until the past few days that Saul Kripke is an important and widely influential philosopher. I knew him from his work in modal logic, but I imagined that he was a logician who worked on a technical subject on the margins of philosophy. (At least I’m better informed than a guy I know who assumed that Kripke must be a category theorist, because there’s something called Kripke-Joyal semantics, which is a translation of Kripke’s work into the language of topos theory.)