Ars Mathematica

Statisticians among us may be interested in Gapminder, free data visualization software from Sweden developed originally to assist in communicating information about global development. The software makes use of web animation tools such as Flash.

I saw a story on Cosmic Variance that I found vaguely shocking. At the SUSY06 conference, there was a rancorous discussion about whether the data from the Large Hadron Collider should be made public. This is probably my ignorance about how high-energy physics works, but I have trouble believing that the answer is anything other than “of course” (perhaps after an embargo period to reward the people actually working on the detector). Some good news that comes out of the comment thread is that in astronomy such public data is readily available.

Is category theory the savior of mathematics, or its destroyer? Discuss.

I have unaccountably forgotten to mention that the June/July Notices of the AMS are available. In addition to the feature articles (about Ramanujan and the Clay Institute), there is a review of Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality. Penrose attempts the obviously impossible task of providing a complete survey of all of modern physics (including string theory and loop quantum gravity) accessible to a nontechnical audience, but with mathematical details. I thought the review was oddly negative: Penrose is attempting something of immense ambition, ambition that cannot help but fall short of its goal, so it’s not surprising that he doesn’t fully succeed.

This month’s What is… is about coarse spaces, which are a new concept to me.

Scott Aaronson has posted an extremely funny parable on his weblog about physicists and impossibility proofs.

I’m flying to Seattle in a few hours, and it is a ~two hour flight. Anyone have any good ideas for a good paper to print out from the Arxiv (or elsewhere) to read during? Anything to keep me absorbed during that tedium? I fly back on Monday, so I suppose it could be a 4 hour paper

The latest issue of Plus Magazine is now out, with articles about Godel and NASA.

Week 234 of John Baez’ This Week in Mathematical Physics is up. Most of this week’s edition is about the relationship of mathematics and music, but he does touch on a topic we’ve discussed before: weird orbits in classical mechanics. Cris Moore and Michael Nauenberg have found many new and strange solutions to the n-body problem and have provided movies (animated GIFs). The most amazing one is 21 bodies all moving along the same figure eight orbit.

The University of Liverpool (UK) has a vacancy for a post-doc researcher and for a PhD student, both in automated mechanism design. The expertise we are looking for includes game theory, mechanism design and auction theory, mathematical economics, and computational versions of same.  These posts are part of a major UK research project on market-based control of complex computational systems.

Details here and here.

I don’t really have a good sense of how much crossover there is between the math blogosphere (such as there is one) and the physics blogosphere (hoo baby!). More specifically, I know that there is some crossover from the physics people to this site, but I am unclear on the other direction. Walt tells me that we have the most read math blog \exists, so I thought I would direct our ten readers to the brouhaha that has managed to coalesce around one of our crossovers, Peter Woit. We link to his blog, so there really is no point to this post, other than for me to comment, that it reminds me of Einstein’s comment “What is all the sturm and drang among the mathematicians?” in reference to the big dust-up brought on by Brouwer’s Intuitionist program, only this time the roles are reversed. Since I have no investment in string theory being correct as far as interpretations go, and only really look at it as some cool mathematics (and get to say “not my area”), I get to embrace the shadenfreud that exists at the core of my being and exhort: FIGHT!, FIGHT!