The latest Bulletin of the AMS is out. We previously linked to Frank Calegari’s introduction to modular forms. Medical image processing has become a major area of applied mathematics, one featured in a survey by Angenent, Pichon, and Tannenbaum. Golubitsky and Stewart discuss network dynamics from the point of view of groupoids.
Holla!
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.
LMS Popular Math Lectures
For readers in the UK, the London Mathematical Society (LMS) is offering two lectures on popular mathematics in London and Birmingham this summer. Â
Mathematics and art
The AMS has a new page devoted to mathematics and art.
Baez Weeks 231, 232, and 233
Connes’ book now available online
Alain Connes, who we’ve talked about before, has added something very exciting to his website: the text of his famous book Noncommutative Geometry as a pdf. There is nothing quite like Connes’ book. It’s part popularization, part research monograph, and part manifesto. I highly recommend taking a look.
Via Not Even Wrong.
Mathematics into the Twenty-First Century
Eagle-eyed Peter Woit spotted an interesting volume on AMS Books Online: a collection of survey articles called Mathematics into the Twenty-First Century. The papers were originally presented at a conference in 1988 held in honor of the AMS’ 100th anniversary. Collectively they provide a picture of the frontier of mathematical research.
AMS Books Online has also added a three-volume history of American mathematics to its General interest section.
Spam
I’ve just deleted about 200-300 spam comments that have appeared over the last day or two. I don’t think I accidentially deleted any actual comments, but if I did, please post again.
Trackbacks (and pingbacks) have now been disabled so there shouldn’t be any more spam and the comment RSS feeds should (hopefully) be safe to subscribe to again. I’d like to re-enable trackbacks again at some stage, but probably not until I’ve figured out how to block this bulk spam.
Easwaran on Conditional Probability
Frequent commenter Kenny Easwaran (who also has a weblog, Antimeta, devoted to philosophy of math) has written several interesting essays on the interpretation of conditional probability:
- What Conditional Probability Must (Almost) Be
- Two Analyses of Conditional Probability in Terms of Unconditional
The question is practically and philosophically interesting in the case that the event you are conditioning on occurs with probability zero.
Numb3rs Shmumbers
The show Numbe3rs was devised by the Bush administration as a disinformation campaign in their war on science. Discuss.