UCLA's New Undergraduate Major in "Data Theory"

At @UCLA (joint between the Math & Stats departments), I helped design a brand new, very exciting Data Theory undergraduate major.

Courses: https://t.co/z27ZJybKQj

To look up course identities: https://t.co/cHcYrQzVcH

Catalog listing: https://t.co/MMOfGX4Cf4 pic.twitter.com/ZZA4E1G8tE

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) August 1, 2019

"Callin' Oates"

You can call the phone number in this picture to get your Hall & Oates fix (in an emergency, of course). Oh, wow!

P.S. I called the number. This is wrong on many levels, but fantastic on many others!

(Tip of the cap to Angela Wilkerson Fitch.)

Wikipedia Page: List of Obsolete Units of Measurement

There is a Wikipedia page that gives a list of obselete units of measurement.

(Tip of the cap to John Dudley.)

Tales from the ArXiv: Everybody Loves Coupled Oscillators (and the Michigan Rag)

If this were my study and I were giving a talk about it, Michigan J. Frog would surely make an appearance.

New on arXiv: "Interaction Mechanisms Quantified from Dynamical Features of Frog Choruses" (by Kaiichiro Ota, Ikkyu Aihara, Toshio Aoyagi): https://t.co/TUWa7wbXwB

[a phase-oscillator model of interactions underlying the choruses of male Japanese tree frogs]

— DynamicalSystemsSIAM (@DynamicsSIAM) July 29, 2019

The Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI) Refrigerator is Tweeting Again

It's baaaaaack: the MBI refrigerator is up and tweeting again.

Illustration of a Queuing System

I am amused. :)

Note their little diplomas and numbering.

(From Kleinrock, 1967) pic.twitter.com/EwYSHsUYNz

— Rachel Traylor (@Mathpocalypse) July 19, 2019

The Physics of Paper Springs!

There is a new paper in Physical Review E about the physics of paper springs (i.e., springs that one constructs by folding paper). I used to do that as a kid, and I think it's really cool that there is now a scientific article about it!

The physics of a paper spring https://t.co/5yMjj4uXuM pic.twitter.com/zilPHpOGeS

— Steven Strogatz (@stevenstrogatz) July 18, 2019

"Who is the Most Important Character in Frozen? What Networks Can Tell Us about the World"

Petter Holme, Hiroki Sayama, and I decided to take on the challenge of writing a mathematics paper for Frontiers for Young Minds, a scientific journal for young readers. Only a handful of mathematics papers have been published among their many hundreds of articles. We decided to give an introduction to networks through the movie Frozen and calculation of centralities. Our paper came out today, and here are some details. You can take a look at our paper either at their website or in .pdf form.

Title: Who is the Most Important Character in Frozen? What Networks Can Tell Us about the World

Authors: Petter Holme, Mason A. Porter, and Hiroki Sayama

Abstract: How do we determine the important characters in a movie like Frozen? We can watch it, of course, but there are also other ways—using mathematics and computers—to see who is important in the social network of a story. The idea is to compute numbers called centralities, which are ways of measuring who is important in social networks. In this paper, we talk about how different types of centralities measure importance in different ways. We also discuss how people use centralities to study many kinds of networks, not just social ones. Scientists are now developing centrality measures that also consider changes over time and different types of relationships.

What Happens in Oxford Stays in Oxford (2019 Edition)

I just got to Oxford this afternoon. Naturally, I already someone I knew on the bus from the airport, and I saw someone else I knew very shortly upon arrival.

I am only staying 6 days this time, although originally I had planned to stay longer. The experience getting to Dresden was harrowing, and I decided to blow up my summer plans and return home much earlier. (A roughly 6.5-week trip is now a roughly 1.5-week one, though I will technically still be using the last week of it—but with an extra round-trip flight from Los Angeles.)

What Happens in Dresden Stays in Dresden (2019 Edition)

I am here in Dresden for our workshop on granular and particulate networks.

This is the first stop on my (now significantly shortened) 2019 European summer tour.

Drosophila Karaoke

My students do so many awesome things!

My former doctoral student Birgit Brüggemeier, who got her doctoral degree as part of my group, has a very cool art project called "Drosophila Karaoke Bar" (which, I suppose, is the modern version of of her old Drosophila Disco).

In the installation, visitors can interact with flies by speaking into a microphone. Their speech is then electronically remixed with fruit fly song and played back to flies who visitors watch on a screen. Very cool!

Right now, it is being exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in Vilnius. Later this year, it will be exhibited at Ars Electronica in Linz, which is one of the world's largest media-art events.

Counting Bots with a Math Dracula

I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Sesame Street and then asked it to write an episode of Sesame Street of its own. Here is the first page. pic.twitter.com/0R2Ww4JkH2

— Keaton Patti (@KeatonPatti) July 2, 2019

(Tip of the cap to Kate Owens.)

RIP Mitchell Feigenbaum (1944–2019)

Mathematical physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum, known for his work on the period-doubling route to chaos in the logistic map and other nonlinear phenomena, died over the weekend.

Here is his wikipedia page.

Update (7/18/19): Today, The New York Times published an obituary of Feigenbaum. The first picture in it is fantastic!

Update (7/23/19): Here is a very nice blog entry by Stephen Wolfram about Feigenbaum, his constant, and other bits of Feigenbaum's history.)