Georg Cantor showed that some infinities are bigger than others. Did he assault mathematical wisdom or corroborate it?
Continue reading “Why some infinities are bigger than others | Aeon Essays”
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🔖 Confessions of the Pricing Man: How Price Affects Everything by Hermann Simon
The world’s foremost expert on pricing strategy shows how this mysterious process works and how to maximize value through pricing to company and customer.
In all walks of life, we constantly make decisions about whether something is worth our money or our time, or try to convince others to part with their money or their time. Price is the place where value and money meet. From the global release of the latest electronic gadget to the bewildering gyrations of oil futures to markdowns at the bargain store, price is the most powerful and pervasive economic force in our day-to-day lives and one of the least understood.
The recipe for successful pricing often sounds like an exotic cocktail, with equal parts psychology, economics, strategy, tools and incentives stirred up together, usually with just enough math to sour the taste. That leads managers to water down the drink with hunches and rules of thumb, or leave out the parts with which they don’t feel comfortable. While this makes for a sweeter drink, it often lacks the punch to have an impact on the customer or on the business.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though, as Hermann Simon illustrates through dozens of stories collected over four decades in the trenches and behind the scenes. A world-renowned speaker on pricing and a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 executives, Simon’s lifelong journey has taken him from rural farmers’ markets, to a distinguished academic career, to a long second career as an entrepreneur and management consultant to companies large and small throughout the world. Along the way, he has learned from Nobel Prize winners and leading management gurus, and helped countless managers and executives use pricing as a way to create new markets, grow their businesses and gain a sustained competitive advantage. He also learned some tough personal lessons about value, how people perceive it, and how people profit from it.
In this engaging and practical narrative, Simon leaves nothing out of the pricing cocktail, but still makes it go down smoothly and leaves you wanting to learn more and do more―as a consumer or as a business person. You will never look at pricing the same way again.
🔖 Linear Operator Theory in Engineering and Science
A unique introduction to the theory of linear operators on Hilbert space. The author presents the basic facts of functional analysis in a form suitable for engineers, scientists, and applied mathematicians. Although the Definition-Theorem-Proof format of mathematics is used, careful attention is given to motivation of the material covered and many illustrative examples are presented.
Checkin Mathematical Sciences Building, UCLA
Complex Analysis II
Los Angeles, California, United States of America
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👓 A Conversation with @LPachter (BS ’94) | Caltech
Pachter, a computational biologist, returns to CalTech to study the role and function of RNA.
Pachter, a computational biologist and Caltech alumnus, returns to the Institute to study the role and function of RNA.
Lior Pachter (BS ’94) is Caltech’s new Bren Professor of Computational Biology. Recently, he was elected a fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, one of the highest honors in the field. We sat down with him to discuss the emerging field of applying computational methods to biology problems, the transition from mathematics to biology, and his return to Pasadena. Continue reading “👓 A Conversation with @LPachter (BS ’94) | Caltech”
Checkin Mathematical Sciences Building, UCLA
Complex Analysis part II
Los Angeles, California, United States of America
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This looks like fun: Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems by John H. Holland
Ackerman Union, Los Angeles, California, United States of America
Syndicated copies to:JUMP Math, a teaching method that’s proving there’s no such thing as a bad math student | Quartz
"Mathematicians have big egos, so they haven’t told anyone that math is easy.”
Checkin Mathematical Sciences Building, UCLA
It’s true what they say, “Complex Analysis IS for lovers.” #theoremoncanonicalproducts #HappyValentinesDay
Los Angeles, California, United States of America
Syndicated copies to:🔖 IPAM Workshop on Gauge Theory and Categorification, March 6-10
The equations of gauge theory lie at the heart of our understanding of particle physics. The Standard Model, which describes the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces, is based on the Yang-Mills equations. Starting with the work of Donaldson in the 1980s, gauge theory has also been successfully applied in other areas of pure mathematics, such as low dimensional topology, symplectic geometry, and algebraic geometry.
More recently, Witten proposed a gauge-theoretic interpretation of Khovanov homology, a knot invariant whose origins lie in representation theory. Khovanov homology is a “categorification” of the celebrated Jones polynomial, in the sense that its Euler characteristic recovers this polynomial. At the moment, Khovanov homology is only defined for knots in the three-sphere, but Witten’s proposal holds the promise of generalizations to other three-manifolds, and perhaps of producing new invariants of four-manifolds.
This workshop will bring together researchers from several different fields (theoretical physics, mathematical gauge theory, topology, analysis / PDE, representation theory, symplectic geometry, and algebraic geometry), and thus help facilitate connections between these areas. The common focus will be to understand Khovanov homology and related invariants through the lens of gauge theory.
This workshop will include a poster session; a request for posters will be sent to registered participants in advance of the workshop.
Edward Witten will be giving two public lectures as part of the Green Family Lecture series:
March 6, 2017
From Gauge Theory to Khovanov Homology Via Floer Theory
The goal of the lecture is to describe a gauge theory approach to Khovanov homology of knots, in particular, to motivate the relevant gauge theory equations in a way that does not require too much physics background. I will give a gauge theory perspective on the construction of singly-graded Khovanov homology by Abouzaid and Smith.
March 8, 2017
An Introduction to the SYK Model
The Sachdev-Ye model was originally a model of quantum spin liquids that was introduced in the mid-1990′s. In recent years, it has been reinterpreted by Kitaev as a model of quantum chaos and black holes. This lecture will be primarily a gentle introduction to the SYK model, though I will also describe a few more recent results.
Entropy | Special Issue: Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods
Open for submission now
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2017
A special issue of Entropy (ISSN 1099-4300).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2017
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Whereas Bayesian inference has now achieved mainstream acceptance and is widely used throughout the sciences, associated ideas such as the principle of maximum entropy (implicit in the work of Gibbs, and developed further by Ed Jaynes and others) have not. There are strong arguments that the principle (and variations, such as maximum relative entropy) is of fundamental importance, but the literature also contains many misguided attempts at applying it, leading to much confusion.
This Special Issue will focus on Bayesian inference and MaxEnt. Some open questions that spring to mind are: Which proposed ways of using entropy (and its maximisation) in inference are legitimate, which are not, and why? Where can we obtain constraints on probability assignments, the input needed by the MaxEnt procedure?
More generally, papers exploring any interesting connections between probabilistic inference and information theory will be considered. Papers presenting high quality applications, or discussing computational methods in these areas, are also welcome.
Dr. Brendon J. Brewer
Guest Editor
Submission
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Entropy is an international peer-reviewed Open Access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1500 CHF (Swiss Francs).
No papers have been published in this special issue yet.
Source: Entropy | Special Issue : Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods
The Map of Mathematics: Animation Shows How All the Different Fields in Math Fit Together | Open Culture
🔖 A de Bruijn identity for discrete random variables by Oliver Johnson, Saikat Guha
We discuss properties of the "beamsplitter addition" operation, which provides a non-standard scaled convolution of random variables supported on the non-negative integers. We give a simple expression for the action of beamsplitter addition using generating functions. We use this to give a self-contained and purely classical proof of a heat equation and de Bruijn identity, satisfied when one of the variables is geometric.
Someone is watching you
Jordan Ellenberg don’t know stat | Rick’s Ramblings
There follows a discussion of flipping coins and the fact that frequencies have more random variation when the sample size is small, but he never stops to see if this is enough to explain the observation.
My intuition told me it did not, so I went and got some brain cancer data.
Jordan Ellenberg is called out a bit by Rick Durrett for one of his claims in the best seller How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking.
I remember reading that section of the book and mostly breezing through that argument primarily as a simple example with a limited, but direct point. Durrett decided to delve into the applied math a bit further.
These are some of the subtle issues one eventually comes across when experts read others’ works which were primarily written for much broader audiences.
I also can’t help thinking that one paints a target on one’s back with a book title like that…
BTW, the quote of the day has to be:
Syndicated copies to:… so I went and got some brain cancer data.