A Band Called "f(x)"

I know nothing about the band — and K-Pop isn't exactly my style anyway — but I definitely like the band's name!

Tales from the ArXiv: "Bourgeois Functions"

The snippet below, from this new paper makes me wonder about a rigorous definition of a "bourgeois function"... 🤔

You Wouldn't Like These Functions When They're Angry

There is a family of special functions called Anger functions. You wouldn't like them when they're angry.

Here is the context: Physics Today has agreed to publish an obituary for Norman Zabusky, so I needed to find some information that they require to be part of it. This led me to Norman's PhD thesis, which I found online. It briefly mentions something called Lommel polynomials, with which I wasn't familiar. The definition in a thesis appendix was terse — it's not exactly an important part of the thesis — so I looked at Wikipedia, and I kept seeing links to special functions that weren't familiar to me, and I have followed a couple of them. Anger functions are one family.

These various special functions are closely related to Bessel functions.

Knight Rider and the Non-Existence of Functions

I think that some mathematics presentations would benefit from an obvious allusion to Night Rider (where you need to imagine the proper word emphasis from the TV series).

"In this paper, I will present a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a function that does not exist."
Coming in 2018 to a university near you.

Here is the original quote (which you can find on this page): Narrator: Knight Rider, a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Michael Knight, a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

An Evans Function: A Wronskian on Crack

Definition: An Evans function is a Wronskian on crack.

I'm pretty sure that this is the official definition that you'll find in many mathematics books.

In case you're interested in these objects, see Todd Kapitula's primer. And here is a new article by Chris Jones that reminded me of the above definition.

Actually, I'm pretty sure I once heard someone — maybe even Chris? — joking call an Evans function "a Wronskian on steroids" during a seminar. I remember thinking that 'on steroids' probably wasn't doing justice to the function.

I've got the power!

Steve Strogatz's latest opinion piece in the New York Times is about powers, exponentials, and logarithms.