If you want to learn all of modern physics, Christine Dantas is here to help.
Tell me it ain’t so!
Finding those math theorems or conjectures just too hard to prove? Then, you need to attend this workshop.
Colbert Report and Spam
According to Steven Colbert on tonight’s Colbert Report, equations are the devil’s sentences. For the past couple of days, this site has been under relentless spam attack (the spam has been showing up in older posts, so no one sees them but me). Clearly, these two events are related.
Flyspeck Project
Via Neighborhood of Infinity, I came across the Flyspeck Project, a project to provide a computer-checked proof of the Kepler conjecture.
The project who proposed by Thomas Hales, who has the only published proof of the theorem. His proof already includes some computer calculations, and turned out to be too complicated to be fully checked by peer review. A complete computer-checked proof would remove any doubts.
The Wikipedia entry links to this elementary introduction by Hales to the proof, Cannonballs and Honeycomb.
Weekend discussion
Understanding of geometry is innate, and cannot be learnt. Discuss.
Mathematical art
Justin Mullins, a British artist, takes photographs of mathematical equations and diagrams. He currently has an exhibition of his work at Lauderdale House, in Highgate, London, UK.
On the uniformization of algebraic curves
I spotted an interesting paper on arXiv with a totally self-explanatory title: On the uniformization of algebraic curves.
Open Thread
All analysts are uptight nerds and all algebraists are dirty hippies. Discuss.
Rho calculus
One important thread in computer science is the study of extensions of the lambda calculus. The lambda calculus is a model of computation that uses rewrite rules based on a simple notion of a function. The rho calculus extends the lambda calculus to allow more general rewrite rules based on pattern matching. For a survey, see the paper Matching Power or the web site The Rho-Calculus Home Page.
Via Lambda the Ultimate.
Cuntz on Noncommutative Topology
A couple of years ago, the Notices of the AMS featured an article on noncommutative geometry a la Connes: Quantum Spaces and Their Noncommutative Topology by Joachim Cuntz. The hallmark of this approach is the heavy reliance on K theory. The first few pages of the article are fairly elementary (and full of intriguing pictures), before the K theory takes over.