Using fMRI, scientists can now distinguish (with 70 percent accuracy) whether you are thinking about addition or subtraction.
Author Archives: Walt
Open Threads?
Just a quick survey question. Now that comment registration has been turned off, is there any interest in open threads?
Question about Projective Determinancy
I have a question about projective determinancy that I was hoping someone could answer. Is projective determinancy provably consistent with ZFC , or does its consistency require large cardinals to prove?
Banach space survey paper
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.
Revolution, Einstein-Style
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.)
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Carnival of Mathematics
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.
Jim Gray Missing
Jim Gray, the 1998 Turing Award winner, has gone missing on a sailing trip off the coast of California to scatter his mother’s ashes.
His book on the inner workings of databases, Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques, is very good.
Update. Cosmic Variance has more about Gray. He was a major contributor to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
Quoted without comment
Commenter tdstephens3 in this thread at Mathematics Under the Microscope:
Mathematicians aren’t born from school math competitions in the same way that poets do not grow out of spelling bees.
January Notices
At the rate I’ve been writing up this post, I’m surprised I finished it before March. The January Notices of the AMS have been out for a while. The feature article, Homological Sensor Networks, describes an application of homology to network design. I predict computational homology will be a major growth area for applied mathematics in the future.
What is… a projective structure introduces manifolds that are locally modelled after projective space. There’s also a review of Fearless Symmetry, which is a popularization of advanced number theory (going so far as to talk about the relationship between number theory and representations of Galois groups, apparently). My library has this book, so I plan taking a look to see how the authors do.
(The February Notices are already online, but I’ll save a post for that when I finally get a chance to look at it. If the March Notices are already online, I don’t want to know about it.)
Tsirelson space
Sometimes I think I have a handle on Banach spaces. Then I contemplate the example of Tsirelson space, which is a Banach space that does not contain as a subspace any classical sequence space (c0 or lp).