Posted in Uncategorized on April 10, 2008 | 4 Comments »
[With apologies for deviating from mathematics]
Gordon Brown and leaders of major political parties of UK have a chance to save the Olympic movement by proposing that, starting from London Olympics of 2012, the Games should be depoliticised:
That British politicians will give every possible behind-the-scene support to the London Games, but will refrain from attending the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on April 8, 2008 | 4 Comments »
If you remember that phony petrol war of September 2000, try to recall what were the first two types of goods which instantly disappeared from supermarket shelves?
This rhetorical question is a preparation for a further discussion of issues touched on in my previous post.
Posted in Uncategorized on April 8, 2008 | 1 Comment »
are best described by Adam Smith’s famous words displayed on a £20 banknote:
“The division of labour in pin manufacturing
(and the great increase in the quanitity of work that results)”
The ever deepening division of labour has reached a unique point in history when 99% of people have not even a vaguest idea about the workings [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on April 8, 2008 | 1 Comment »
From NYT: Image of a migraine by Anne Adams, who was drawn to structure and repetition. She had a rare disease that changes connections between parts of the brain.
Posted in Uncategorized on April 7, 2008 | 1 Comment »
It is many years that I know the expression which belongs to Arnold and which sound something like that:
Altitudes of a triangle intersect in one point because of the Jacobi identity.
What is meant here is the defining identity of Lie algebras which is known in undergraduate mathematics mostly as an identity for cross product of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on April 7, 2008 | No Comments »
Please visit this page on Prof. Tao’s blog to support an important online petition. You may want to read more about the context/background over here.
Posted in Uncategorized on April 6, 2008 | No Comments »
Mandalas are highly symmetric geometric patterns ” that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the Universe from the human perspective” (Wikipedia).
A buddist Mandala, Wikipedia.
And these are mandalas advertised in tatoo-me.com:
Posted in Uncategorized on April 4, 2008 | 3 Comments »
This is a follow-up to my earlier post on “named” numbers; the text is mostly cannibalised from my book; I refer the reader to the book (available for free download) for bibliography, etc.
The famous mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov was the author of what remains the most striking and beautiful example of a dimensional analysis [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on April 1, 2008 | 10 Comments »
Mark A. Wilson in Inside Higher ED:
I propose that all academics with research specialties, no matter how arcane (and nothing is too obscure for Wikipedia), enroll as identifiable editors of Wikipedia. We then watch over a few wikipages of our choosing, adding to them when appropriate, stepping in to resolve disputes when we know something [...]
