Excerpts of an Interview with Steve Strogatz about Math

Here are some excerpts of an interview with Steve Strogatz about what mathematics is, teaching math, learning math, and more.

There's some really good stuff in here!

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.)

Seriously?

Seriously?

We have reached Idiocracy. I am simultaneously crying, laughing hysterically (probably to prevent additional crying), and really angry. What a country America is now, and the rest of the world feels pretty barmy at the moment too.

(Tip of the cap to Ernie Barreto for the Washington Post article, parts of which have previously spread widely.

Caltech: The Hottest Thing in Irish Lifestyle

After Caltech got named the #1 university in the world, the biggest newspaper in Ireland interviewed me -- as well as a couple of other familiar names -- to talk about it.

Unfortunately some of my best quotes got removed from the article. (Our book isn't even mentioned anymore, and my comment about physics and Dungeons & Dragons was in an earlier version of the article but got cut. The reason I was interviewed is of course because of the Legends of Caltech III book.)

Update (11/05/11): I found a link to what looks like the middle of an article that has some of the stuff that was left on the now-proverbial cutting-room floor. If any of you find a long version of the article to which I link above that contains something approximating a union of the text in these two URLs, please let me know.

What happens in Urbana-Champaign stays in Urbana-Champaign

Tomorrow morning I will fly away from North Carolina to visit University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and give a seminar in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering.

Back in 2002 (when I was still a graduate student), I interviewed for a faculty position in that department. It was still called the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the time, as the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics had not yet joined forces with it. This is my first time visiting UIUC since that long-ago interview.

I know quite a few faculty members at UIUC both in that department and in other departments (in fact, one of my friends from graduate school is in the MechSE Department), and one of my friends from my postdoc era at Caltech is currently a graduate student in physics at UIUC. She was my regular ping pong partner back then, though whether or not we actually play ping pong or hang out in some other way (she'll be picking me up and dropping me off at the Indiana-Bloomington airport, for example) depends on whether we can actually find a ping pong table.

My Interview with Princeton University Press blog for Mathematics Awareness Month 2010

I was interviewed by e-mail for the Princeton University Press blog in honor of Mathematics Awareness Month 2010 (on "Mathematics and Sports"). You can find that question and answer session on this page.

A More Informal Interview

Here is my Question and Answer session with the baseball blog 27pitches.com. I'm not exactly a sabermetrics guru, but maybe I can be one when I finally grow up?

Some words from Vin Scully

Courtesy Rob Neyer's blog, here is a short video blurb from Vin Scully in which he talks about past, present, and future.

CNN article on Oxford and Cambridge admissions questions

CNN has posted an article on Oxford and Cambridge admissions questions. Personally, I think the following one is pretty awesome:

"How would you poison someone without the police finding out?"

There is a video version of the report that also has some interesting questions. Some of them are definitely pretty weird. Questions I have used and plan to use won't be discussed in this spot, but let's just say that I can be pretty evil. (This year I'm not interviewing anyway, which is why I can fly home this Saturday.)