We can haz maths?

This was in a tweet from Ed Yong, so I assume it’s kosher.

Statisticians 51, Pundits 0

by Greg Mayer As both an undergraduate and graduate student, I was fortunate to be taught statistics by some of the best statistical minds in biology: Robert Sokal and Jim Rohlf at Stony Brook, and Dick Lewontin at Harvard. All three have influenced biostatistics enormously, not just through their many students, but also through writing […]

Flash Anzan: an amazing new number game

The Guardian‘s science section reports on a new numbers game, “Flash Anzan.” It’s based on the Japanese abacus, or soroban, which a million Japanese kids learn to use every year.  The game requires mental representations of an abacus; the game, according to author Alex Bellos, goes like this: . . . 15 numbers are flashed […]

Π in the sky!

Now this is conceptual art that I like.  On Sept. 12, 5 planes printed out the first 1,000 digits of pi using skywriting and digital presentation.  The printing stretched over a 100-mile path (see below) encircling San Francisco Bay. According to Open Culture, “. . . the Pi project was the brainchild of ISHKY, an eclectic […]

Rosenhouse on math jargon

Taking as his starting point my “rant” about the impenetrability of scientific papers in mathematics, Jason Rosenhouse has written a nice essay on what it’s like to be a mathematician who has to try to make sense of the papers of other mathematicians. It turns out that those papers are often as impenetrable to math […]