Mathematics Jokes (and science too)

I just have to post a link to this “Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor“. If you laugh with any of these jokes then congratulations, you’re one of us. If you don’t then congratulations.
Also check out Richard Dawkins’s TEDtalk here for one of the funniest jokes I’ve ever heard from a scientist. After referring to an [...]

Platonic-Physical-Mental worlds - Penrose

Roger Penrose has written an astounding book: The Road to Reality. Not content with asking the reader, and apparently he expects non-scientists to read this book, to learn about quantum mechanics and general relativity (and all of their modern descendants, worthy or not), he spends the first 350 pages introducing enough mathematics to get you [...]

Perelman’s Poincare Proof Plaudits

Science magazine hails the proof of the Poincare conjecture as their breakthrough of the year.
Comment posted by Alena Roo (from vox)
[this is good]
This isn’t just good, it’s great. A few days ago I stumbled upon an Internet forum where some person claimed that “Chinese scientists found the proof of the Poincare conjecture”. It was [...]

“Love thy neighbour” may be Darwinian

The title of the following Scientific American news article speaks for itself: Love Thy Neighbor Evolved Out of Vicious Competition.

“A golden crown, a life in the balance, a naked mathematician”

In an earlier post I discussed the mythological history of science. One famous example is Archimedes running naked through the streets of Syracuse yelling “Eureka!” (”I have found it!” - but sadly this probably never happened. What intrigued me about this little story is that the way Archimedes probably solved the problem at hand was [...]

Ancient computers - where did they go?

Read about the incredible sophistication of the Antikythera Mechanism, a clockwork computer over 2,000 years old which probably displayed the positions of the planets as seen from Earth and was used to calculate eclipses.

Bayes’s Theorem and God

 
Scientific American has a well-written article entitled What is Bayes’s theorem, and how can it be used to assign probabilities to questions such as the existence of God? What scientific value does it have?

Blog Index - Blox

Jorge Hirsch recently proposed An Index to Quantify an Individual’s Scientific Research Output that reveals much more about how important that individual’s work is than merely looking at her output. It garnered quite a bit of attention, and has begun to be applied in different ways. The idea is simple: the h-index is the whole [...]

Classical Mathematics Puzzles (i)

My very first day as an undergraduate in the maths department of University College London featured a very entertaining talk by David Singmaster. I kept the list of puzzles he gave us which he had collected from medieval manuscripts. I assume, therefore, that they are in the public domain, and will post some here from [...]

Myntende Pledge for Scientists

A few years before my idealism was worn away, I composed the following voluntary pledge for scientists. I can’t remember where the word Myntende comes from (Google returns no hits - none at all) - I think it was a corruption of an Old English word for honour, or somesuch. I would welcome any comments.
I [...]