Posted by tpc at March 26th, 2007
Ah, the wonders of youtube. We can now view videos of Tom Lehrer performing some of his musical compositions. It’s great old fashioned music.
He sang the following songs with lyrics complied on this site by Graeme Cree.
1) The Derivative Song
2) There’s a Delta for every Epsilon
3) The Professor
4) Sociology
5) That’s Mathematics
Dig around, there’s also a video somewhere of the song New Math.
Posted by tpc at March 22nd, 2007
I spotted this little book at the library and flipped through it. I saw the names Cauchy, Euler and d’Alembert and was immediately thinking “oh differential equations” until I flipped to this lovely nested square root
courtesy of Ramanujan.
This book turns out to be a guide to competition problem solving by Christopher Small. I’m not very big on competition problem solving, probably because I can’t do most of them, but I do like to work on some of them every once in a while. I’ve read most of the book, and quite like it.
Oh, the expression above evaluates to 3. Try it!
Posted by tpc at March 15th, 2007
Picked up this book from and library. I particularly liked this paragraph:
Intuition, in the Star Wars sense, may be the most important and most ignored part of our machine-oriented world. When do you look beyond the rational, the routine, to see what is really around you? Trust your feelings, your “instincts.” In science, you need to know when your equipment isn’t working properly. We’re obsessed with high technology, yet a few bad sensors can cause the meltdown of a megawatt nuclear generator, and a small chunk of foam insulation can destroy a billion-dollar space shuttle and its crew. Skywalker, strong in the Force, knew when to use his computer and when to ignore it. Do we?
And how do you develop this intuition in maths? By immersing yourself in it, by working through pages and pages of calculations and certainly not through using fancy-schmancy calculators!
Posted by tpc at March 3rd, 2007
according to J-P Serre. I spent an hour watching this video of his talk. Considering I may never have the chance to meet him in person, this was not a bad way to spend Saturday morning. It is accessible to a general audience although you probably need to know some homological algebra, analytic number theory and other stuff to appreciate the points he was trying to convey.
I first saw the link via Steve’s weblog although many sites are also carrying the link. Not surprising since there are so many mathematicians blogging now, including Terry Tao and Alain Connes. Read this nice post by Steve.
No time to spare? This article by David Goss, which incorporates hints from Serre, contain a few of the points highlighted in the talk. In trying to link it, I discovered this version was updated Feb 2007.
