For those nattering nabobs of negativity among you who insist that correlation does not equal causation, I give the ultimate counterexample: clear and incontrovertible proof that the decline in US oil production has led to a decline in the quality of the US’s rock music: The Hubbert Peak Theory of Rock.

If you’re interested in learning about recursion theory and the Godel incompleteness theorem, these lecture notes by Jeremy Avigad are terrific. In this approach, incompleteness follows from properties of algorithms, which I think is the clearest approach.

It turns out that the standard picture of Adrien-Marie Legendre was actually a picture of his contemporary, the revolutionary Louis Legendre. (See the Notices article for the story. Gérard P. Michon has a photograph of the only known portrait of Adrien-Marie Legendre (a caricature).

Next up: mathematicians discover that the inventor of algebraic topology was not, after all, the President of France during World War I.

Oswaldo Zapata Marín is writing a series of essays about the history of superstring theory at Spinning the Superweb. His first essay, On Facts in Superstring Theory, describes something that is very mysterious to me as a math person: the process by which conjectures in string theory achieve a status akin to fact.

Via Not Even Wrong.

If you’re interested in large cardinals, Akihiro Kanamori has made available a (typed rather than typeset) version of his and Magidor’s survey paper, The Evolution of Large Cardinal Axioms in Set Theory.

If you’re interested in more advanced set theory links, this page provides links to individual author’s pages where you can find drafts of chapters for the upcoming three-volume Handbook of Set Theory.