Things for Mathematicians to be Grateful For

Today's entry in the blog Math with Bad Drawings has some brilliant pictures!

It's really hard to pick a favorite. Maybe the one with the analyst or the one with the belated referee report?

New to the Blogroll: Math with Bad Drawings

On occasion, I have really enjoyed entries from the blog Math with Bad Drawings, and I am now adding it to the blogroll (much later than I should have).

Great Opening Lines from Literature as Written by Mathematicians

I approve of this blog entry!.

(Tip of the cap to MathFeed.)

"Everything Sounds Better with Mathematics"

As the blog Math with Bad Drawings points out, everything sounds better with mathematics.

Damn right!

For example, cavities are "just point discontinuities of oral hygiene!"

A UCLA Math Undergrad's Data-Analysis Blog

UCLA undergraduate student Ritvik Kharkar, who is doing some research with me, is doing some spiffy data analysis on his blog. Go take a look at it!

It includes entries about community detection (in the Harry Potter universe), education issues, and UCLA salaries.

"Women, Mathematics, and the Periodical Tradition in Britain: or a History of Women Rocking Math from the Beginning"

Jacqueline D. Wernimont has written a very cool blog post about The Ladies' Diary.

Here is a quote from her post that describes the publication venue:

"One way to look at it is as a chimeric text with the head of an almanac, the body of a literary-mathematical periodical, with commonplace wings and a tail of recipes. It is fantastic.

Without question, it is the first mathematical periodical in Britain and it was designed explicitly for women and was published as such for more than five generations."

Very cool!

(Tip of the cap to Rachel Levy.)

A Useful Blog Entry About Interviewing for Faculty Jobs

This blog entry is a useful resource for people interviewing for faculty jobs (or who have members or alums from their groups interviewing for such jobs).

It is written within a specific context, but it includes points that apply much more generally.

Some of the links therein also look potentially useful.

(Tip of the cap to Meghan Duffy.)

My Snark has Appeared on a Buzzfeed List of Quotes in Scientific Publications

Hey, look! We made a Buzzfeed list (in January 2015)! This may be another Achievement Unlocked, but then again this is a user-created list. So maybe it doesn't constitute one.

This list includes some classics. I am pretty sure that the list was scoured in large part (almost completely?) from the tumblr Easter Eggs in Scientific Papers, and I did point out my entry (#11) on this list to him, and he then posted it on the Easter Eggs tumblr.

And I have many more examples where #11 came from. (Here is the paper in question.)

(Tip of the cap to Andrea Bertozzi.)

"Everything is Fucked: The Syllabus"

Sanjay Srivastava (University of Oregon) put together a summary of the field of psychology called "Everything is Fucked: The Syllabus".

My favorite quote from his blog entry is the following one: "The format of this seminar is as follows: Each week we will read and discuss 1-2 papers that raise the question of whether something is fucked." Amidst the topics of all of the other weeks, I am highly amused by the title of week 7: "Interlude: Everything is fine, calm the fuck down".

Of course, there is also the serious side to this about the enormous amount of messiness in basically every step in fields like psychology (and of course there are significant complications in scientific practice more generally).

I know I would be interested in taking this course! Would you?

(Tip of the cap to the Improbable Research blog.)

Pedestrian Standoffs and Symmetry Breaking

My latest post for the Improbable Research blog concerns pedestrian standoffs and symmetry breaking.

Network Alignment and Star Wars

Take a look for yourself.

(Tip of the cap to Jennifer Nicoll Victor.)

The Acoustics of Breaking Chopsticks

In my latest post for the Improbable Research blog, I discuss the acoustics of breaking chopsticks.

The Impressive Strength of Interleaved Phonebooks

My latest entry for the Improbable Research blog concerns the impressive strength of interleaved phonebooks.

I managed to miss the blog entry about this that appeared in August. Oops! But at least I coined the phrase "Hercules number".

A New Quasipolynomial Time Algorithm for Graph Isomorphisms

In case you haven't been paying attention, you may be interested in reading Jeremy Kun's post about the seminar covering the announced quasipolynomial algorithm for graph isomorphism. Once the preprint comes out and it is vetted, I hope the result does turn out to be genuine. Exciting times!

Tenure, She Wrote

Tenure, She Wrote looks like a really useful blog by and about women in academia.

Here is the description on their website: Tenure, She Wrote is a collaborative blog devoted to chronicling the (mis)adventures of women in academia, from undergraduate to Full Professor. We’re a diverse group representing many walks of life, career stages, institutional affiliations, disciplines, and opinions.

(Tip of the cap to Rachel Levy.)

The Entropy Zoo

I am going through the draft of a chapter that includes a survey of similarity measures (and I'll need to see if an appropriate survey exists, as we should use this material to help write one if it doesn't), and the appearance of information-theoretic measures naturally made me think of the Entropy Zoo, which I saw yesterday on the Quantum Frontiers blog.

(Who's down with en-tro-py?!?)

The Physics of Water-Skipping Stones

See my post on the Improbable Research blog.

New to the Blogroll: Bruggebrain

Through the magic of e-mail signatures, I noticed that my doctoral student Birgit Brüggemeier has a blog. She studies neurogenetics, and is working on an awesome project. You can read about what she studies on her page.

At some point, I should also delete the blogs on the blogroll that are no longer being updated, but for now I'll let you --- dear reader --- scroll just a little bit more. That is what Janis Joplin sang about, right?

Pop Sonnets

The blog Pop Sonnets presents Shakespearean-sonnet versions of pop songs. It's pretty amusing.

(Tip of the cap to Alan Champneys.)

New to the Blogroll: Easter Eggs in Scientific Papers

There is a new blog called Easter Eggs in Scientific Papers. Most of the good ones that it's discussed so far are incidents I already knew about, but it's still good to collect them in one place, and I'm sure that there are plenty of good ones to come. (I should remove some of the blogs that are never updated from the blogroll, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet.)

(Tip of the cap to Petter Holme.)