thnik again!

It is nice to see how the number of free online mathematical journals is increasing. The latest one out is JUM, Journal of Unpublishable Mathematics. Volume 1 can be found for download on this page.

How do you determine the best of 32 soccer teams? That’s the question.

One way is being tried out in South Africa right now. Seed some teams and make up 8 groups with 4 teams in each. Call it round 1. Let every team meet every other team in the group in round 1 and let the two best teams advance to the second round. In the second round the 16 teams play an elimination tournament, one loss and you are out.

In my opinion the system has several serious flaws.

1. Not every match counts. You may lose a match in round 1, but if you advance to round 2 it is of no importance.
2. Because of point 1 the early matches are less exciting as they may be of no importance.
3. The teams do not play the same number of matches. If you don’t go to round 2 you play only 3 matches, while the finalists play 7.
4. Some teams are seeded based on previous performance giving them an advantage. All teams should enter the tournament on the same footing.
5. The system only determines the best team. The losing finalists may not be the second best team and for the other teams they don’t get a final score showing how well they did.

CC: It’s 2006, so it’s fifty years since Mathematics, Magic and Mystery appeared. I wondered if we could wind the clock back a little bit and if you can tell us how that book came about.

MG: When I was living in New York, I use to go to a gathering of mathematicians at Yeshiva University, and it was a gathering that was run by a fellow named Jekuthiel Ginsburg who edited Scripta Mathematica, a magazine devoted to history of mathematics. He found out that I was interested in mathematical magic and asked me to do a series of articles, for Scripta. So I did a series of pieces, one on card tricks and one on dice tricks and on miscellaneous objects and so on, and I put those together and that became a book. That is how it became about and Dover published it and I was paid a total of $500 for it. No royalties, but later it got translated into French and German and fortunately for me and unfortunately for Dover, they forgot to put into the clause anything about foreign sales. So I got all the royalties on foreign sales and made far more on the German edition then I did on the English one. That is how that came about.

Read the entire interview here.

Lucia de Berk is a Dutch nurse who has spent six years of a life sentence in jail for murdering seven people in a killing spree that never happened. She will hear about her appeal on Wednesday, and there is now little doubt that she will be cleared. The statistical errors in the evidence against her were so crass that they can be explained in one newspaper column. So will the people who jailed her apologise? - Read more

Richard D Gill has written a lot about the fiasco:

1. Elementary statistics on trial (one in twenty-five innocent nurses go to jail (joint with P. Groeneboom; preliminary version)
2. On the (ab)use of statistics in the legal case against the nurse Lucia de B, preprint at arXiv.org/math.ST/0607340, final version published (with discussion by David Lucy) in Law, Probability and Risk, 2007, joint with Marieke Collins, Michiel van Lambalgen, Ronald Meester.
3. Lucia talk at Vierhouten hackers conferencee Lies damned lies and legal truths
4. Astin day presentation: a story in a story Statistics and Ethics (Dutch outside, English inside)
5. Lies, damned lies, and legal truths (2009), prepublication
6. Remarks on the Lucia data - why the numbers keep changing (2009)

Wikipedia article.

She made the top-ten list, but who is she?

If you were to pick the ten greatest mathematician, alive or dead, who would you pick? How many would be alive? How many would be women?

Think about it and then have a look at Alex Bellos’ selection here.

Update:

A BBC documentary on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing.

What is a mathematician?

To be more personal, am I a mathematician? I have a master degree from the faculty of mathematics at the University of Oslo, Norway, but does that make me a mathematician?

In my mind, the answer is easy. “No way!”

A mathematician is someone, regardless of formal education or the lack of it, creates valuable mathematics. If you have a PhD and do mathematical research, but what you produce is of no significance you are not, in my book, a mathematician.

The question came up when I read New York Times this morning.

So imagine the surprise when Juan Manuel Santos, a former defense minister and the architect of some of Mr. Uribe’s crushing blows against leftist guerrillas, found himself trailing in recent national polls to a quirky, unpredictable mathematician who murmurs in French about arcane philosophical concepts and wears a chinstrap beard with the air of a latter-day Thoreau.

Santos, who is four days older than me, has this written about him in Wikipedia.

Aurelijus Rutenis Antanas Mockus Šivickas (born 25 March 1952 in Bogotá), is a Colombian mathematician, philosopher, and politician …

Mockus holds a 1972 Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics from the University of Burgundy in Dijon, France and a 1988 Master of Arts degree in philosophy from the National University of Colombia.

It may be that Santos has created valuable mathematics, but the Wikipedia article doesn’t mention it.

What are you? Do you see yourself as a mathematician? What is your definition?

Everyone knows that something is wrong.  The politicians say, “we need higher standards.”
The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.” Educators say one thing, and teachers say another.  They are all wrong.  The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students.  They say, “math class is stupid and boring,” and they are right. - From ‘A Mathematician’s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form’ by Paul Lockhart

Read more here (pdf). Who is Paul Lockhart? you ask.

” . . .Paul became interested in mathematics when he was about 14 (outside of the school math class, he points out) and read voraciously, becoming especially interested in analytic number theory. He dropped out of college after one semester to devote himself to math, supporting himself by working as a computer programmer and as an elementary school teacher. Eventually he started working with Ernst Strauss at UCLA, and the two published a few papers together. Strauss introduced him to Paul Erdos, and they somehow arranged it so that he became a graduate student there. He ended up getting a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1990, and went on to be a fellow at MSRI and an assistant professor at Brown. He also taught at UC Santa Cruz. His main research interests were, and are, automorphic forms and Diophantine geometry.

After several years teaching university mathematics, Paul eventually tired of it and decided he wanted to get back to teaching children. He secured a position at Saint Ann’s School (in Brooklyn), where he says “I have happily been subversively teaching mathematics (the real thing) since 2000.”

He teaches all grade levels at Saint Ann’s (K-12), and says he is especially interested in bringing a mathematician’s point of view to very young children. “I want them to understand that there is a playground in their minds and that that is where mathematics happens. So far I have met with tremendous enthusiasm among the parents and kids, less so among the mid-level administrators” . . .” - From here.

Wikipedia has this to say about the academic program at Saint Ann’s:

The school’s program for the arts includes Costume Making and Design, Printmaking, Architecture and Design, Figure Drawing, African Dance, Modern Dance, Film Production, Intensive Acting, Technical Theater and Play Production, Puppetry, Playwriting, Voice and more. Academically, Saint Ann’s is extremely strong: the school allows its high school juniors and seniors to essentially design their own curricula. Furthermore, in a 2004 survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal, Saint Ann’s was rated the number one high school in the country (for having the highest percentage of graduating seniors enrolling in Ivy League and other highly selective colleges).^[2] In late 2007, the Wall Street Journal again listed Saint Ann’s as one of the world’s top 50 schools for its success in preparing students to enter top American universities.^[3] (My highlights.)

This video by a math teacher has been watched close to two million times on YouTube.

The other day I watched an episode of the Daily Show with John Stewart.

10 minutes and 30 seconds into the show there is a clip where FoxNews asks what the Nuclear Security Summit’s symbol has in common with the flags of the Muslim nations shown below.

Fox News suggests that President Obama chose the symbol to please the Muslim nations as it is ’similar to Muslim image’.

Jon Stewart did the obvious thing, he called the White House and asked them how the logo was chosen.

The answer is found in any Chemistry text book. The logo was inspired by the Niels Bohr’s model of the hydrogen atom.

Stewart’s conclusion:

It turns out that it is worse than we thought. It turns out that the people in the White House are not Muslims, they are nerds!

To mock Fox News further Jon Stewart finds Fox News’ logo looks like 3rd Reich poster and the Kamikaze flag.

To me it is refreshing to see how Stewart use satire and under statement to bring his points across. He must have read Kierkegaard.

The secret of communication is to liberate the other. Therefore one should not communicate in a straight forward fashion, yes it is even ungodly to do so.

Update: New York Times had this article today. By the way, I wrote the above last week.