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The Response of the Schoolmaster

This must certainly be the quote of the week from English author Alan Bennett’s play Forty Years On:

Foster: I’m still a bit hazy about the Trinity, sir.
Schoolmaster: Three in one, one in three, perfectly straightforward.  Any doubts about that see your maths master.

 

HARASS SARAH is a PALINdrome, as well as a popular left-wing sport.

This is definitely the quote of the week:

Incidentally, I note that ‘HARASS SARAH’ is a PALINdrome, as well as a popular left-wing sport.

Sol Golomb, mathematician and information theorist
via personal communication while discussing a palindromic word puzzle

Nicholas Bourbaki and Serge Lang

Replied to Scientific Fiction – The Bourbaki Mystery by Sue Vazakas (The Sheridan Libraries Blog)

In the 1930s, a French mathematician began writing journal articles and books. His name was Nicolas Bourbaki. He didn’t exist.

Bourbaki was and is actually a group of brilliant and influential mathematicians, mostly French but not all, whose membership changes but whose collective purpose remains the same: to write about mathematical topics they deem important. Between 1939 and 1967 “he” wrote a series of influential books about these selected topics, collectively called Elements of Mathematics.

A mysterious, mostly anonymous group of writers publishing momentous things under a single name is just really cool. But don’t try to read any of his stuff unless you are an expert mathematician.

Instead, read a wonderful story by novelist and award-winning chemist Carl Djerassi, called The Bourbaki Gambit. What do you think happens when a group of scientists, being discriminated against for various reasons, team up and use the “Bourbaki” approach to try to get their latest discovery taken seriously?

There’s an old mathematicians’ joke that goes like this:

Q: When did Nicholas Bourbaki quit writing books about mathematics?

A: When (t)he(y) realized that Serge Lang was only one person!

Twitter Changes Rules on Users. No Auto-Follow. | Kyle Lacy

Replied to Twitter Changes Rules on Users. No Auto-Follow. by Kyle Lacy (kylelacy.com)
(hat tip to ZDNEt and Chris McEvoy for the lead) From ZDNet: “With no notice, Twitter yesterday “pulled the rug out from under its developers” one developer says, by discouraging auto-following and imposing 1,000 person-per-day following limits.” Now… this is not news to me because of the “pulling the rug out from under its developers” thing or the 1,000 person-per-day following limit… The news to me as a Twitter user… I don’t really remember getting a message or alert that the new limits were going to be enacted. I use Twitter on a daily basis. It seems fairly odd that I would not know about the change.
I’m personally glad they’d be implementing something like this and wish they had done it about a month ago. Eventually without any controls the site would have become a waste land. In the spirit of using it as the tool it has become, they needed to implement changes like this as the site scaled up to more and more people. It’s very similar to the changes they instituted in the fall of 2008 when they created a cap of being able to follow more than 2000 people when your own number of followers wasn’t commensurate with that number. As a game theorist, I’m sure that people will somehow find some other way to artificially game the system.

As a separate note, who really wants to waste the time building thousands and thousands of followers when none of them are really going to ever pay attention to you? Yes, it’s great to have a high number, but really what is your ultimate reach? How many people are you engaging?

Finished reading Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought by P.B. Medawar

Originally published in 1969. This book explains what is wrong with the traditional methodology of “inductive” reasoning and shows that the alternative scheme of reasoning associated with Whewell, Pierce and Popper can give the scientist a useful insight into the way he thinks.

References:

Christopher J. Aldrich, Engr ’96, of Los Angeles, writes:
“I recently booked Bea Arthur into two episodes of the TV show “Malcolm in the Middle,” for which she received an Emmy nomination. Following this, I left Creative Artists Agency to join David Entertainment, where I helped to produce MGM’s Breakers, starring Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt. Now I’m preparing for production of Doctor Doolittle 2, starring Eddie Murphy and Behind Enemy Lines, with Gene Hackman and Owen Wilson.”