I’ve been trying to learn something about Banach spaces, the kinds of things you wouldn’t see in an introductory functional analysis course. I found this dense survey paper, Basic concepts in the geometry of Banach spaces by Johnson and Lindenstrauss, on William Johnson’s website.
I ran across the oddest anecdote about Einstein. Einstein was teaching a class in Germany in 1918. When in the aftermath of World War I Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated, he put a sign on the classroom door that said “Class cancelled because of revolution.” (This link mentions the story.)
Alon Levy is organizing a Carnival of Mathematics.
I’ve run across these on biology weblogs, but I have to admit I’m not 100% sure how weblog carnivals work. I know that this makes me sound like an old fogey who doesn’t know how to work his VCR and bitches about kids these days, but as far as I know I may already be an old fogey who doesn’t know how to work his VCR and bitches about kids these days. In my day, we had to do integrals in our head while walking to school in five feet of snow. Not only was it uphill both ways, but we weren’t allowed to use elementary functions, only power series. And not power series the way you use them today, where you can just use the first few coefficients, or a closed-form formula. No, we had to write out the whole power series, term by term. Back then, we were tough.