This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Not such a comfort — To see how a man’s stress levels and diet might alter his shape, one might give comfort food to a stressed rat and study its penis. Researchers at the State University of […]
Doron Zeilberger cast a wary glance at the social gathering habits of his fellow mathematicians. He wrote a little, gleeful diatribe about it: Opinion 104: The Shocking State of Contemporary “Mathematics”, and the Meta-Shocking Fact that Very Few People Are Shocked I just came back from attending the 1052nd AMS (sectional) meeting at Penn State, […]
Gian-Carlo Rota explained, in 1997, a difference between mathematicians and scientists: To a scientist, nature is a primeval forest to be explored, rich in surprising and unpredictable fauna, endowed with mysterious laws that scientists bravely wrest from the jungle. Once discovered, the laws of nature are written up by scientists for the benefit of posterity, […]
John Urschel is not your ordinary National Football League offensive lineman. He may be a professional football player by day, but by night he is a spectral graph theorist (and numerical linear algebraist). His latest paper has now been accepted for publication in Journal of Computational Mathematics. Urschel announced via Twitter that his paper had […]