Discover Magazine has published a list of the 25 greatest science books. The list is almost exclusively either original works of research (such as Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of Species, the top 2 books), or popularizations of that research by experts in the field (such as The Double Helix by James Watson).

If you ever tired of the normal this and abelian that of math, check out these lists of names that geneticists have given to fruit flies, zebrafish, and other organisms, here and here. My personal favorite is the british rail gene, which supresses the effect of the always early gene. Some of the names, like cheap date, are vaguely descriptive (the gene increases susceptibility to alcohol), while others such as pray for elves seem to indicate DMT use. And I’m sure while the first twenty times you hear a gene named sonic hedgehog, it’s funny, but soon you reach the twenty-first, and it sinks in that you’ll probably be stuck hearing it for the rest of your life…

Via Pharyngula.

Cool optical illusion.

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Roger Kornberg for eukaryotic transcription, something that most people would regard as biology. This touched off some agonizing about the Meaning of it All at Uncertain Principles, In the Pipeline, and Adventures in Ethics and Science. Paul Bracher even went so far as to suggest that chemists move in on the physics prize.

Hey, at least they have a prize.

I ran across this journey to understand Poincaré and thought I would pass it on. I am a big fan of the idea of popularizations, and am especially enamored with the “you too could have invented X”  leitmotif that is statrting to emerge in that space (I read your version on CS Monads, sigfpe. it only made me like the form more). This link isn’t in that vein, but any effort is a worthwhile one in my book. It is a work in progress, so I am worried about commenting on it, but I am interested in people’s opinion of it. Is it off target for any particular audience other than the author? By that I mean the people who know the math will think too little is being said, while the ones who do not will be under the impression the trees are occluding the forest. More to the point, is any popularization doomed to such a critique?

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

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!

Could someone with accurate knowledge of the state of the verification of Perelman’s proof of the Poincare conjecture comment on this article?

I would like to know if it is complete crap or not.

My math sibling Anton Dochtermann recently posted a paper to the Arxiv, HOM COMPLEXES AND HOMOTOPY THEORY IN THE CATEGORY OF GRAPHS introducing the idea of weak equivalence to the category of graphs (model graph category anyone?) and subsumes other graph homotopy theories into the framework. This is all a natural progression of research that has its roots in in the topological ideas introduced in Lov’asz’s proof of Kneser’s conjecture and culminates in K-theory for graphs I suppose.

Stay tuned for a paper from another math sibling Matt Kahle, giving classes of graphs for which the chromatic number estimate in Lov’asz’s proof is tight.

The show Numbe3rs was devised by the Bush administration as a disinformation campaign in their war on science. Discuss.