I just saw the movie Stranger than Fiction, and I noticed a strange pattern in the last names of characters: Pascal, Hilbert, Escher, Cayley, Mittag-Leffler. Also, the main character’s favorite word is “integer”. The main character has a penchant for counting, but other than that the movie is as far removed from mathematics as can be imagined, so it’s all very mysterious.

The December Notices of the AMS are out. The two features articles are:

• The Search for Symmetric Simple Venn Diagrams considers Venn diagrams as mathematical objects in their own right, rather than just as a graphical representation of sets.
• Better Ways to Cut a Cake discusses the game theory of cake cutting.

This month’s What is a… Quasiconformal Mapping introduces a generalization of conformal mappings that makes sense in general metric spaces.

A friend of mine who’s studying econometrics asked me about the Kalman filter, which is used in estimating the parameters of a time series model. I didn’t know anything about the subject, so I was poking around online, where I discovered that the Kalman filter is rocket science: it was invented to estimate the current position and trajectory of the Apollo spacecraft. And here I thought the only concrete result of the space program was Tang.

Alexandre Borovik, who occasionally comments here, has begun uploading draft chapters of his new book, Mathematics under the Microscope: Notes on Cognitive Aspects of Mathematical Practice, here. The first three chapters are already available.

Via David Corfield.