My long streak of posting something every day will end. There’s just no keeping up mathematics content like this indefinitely, not with my stamina. But it’s not over just quite yet. I wanted to share some stuff that people had brought to my attention and that’s just too interesting to pass up.
The first comes from … I’m not really sure. I lost my note about wherever it did come from. It’s from the Continuous Everywhere But Differentiable Nowhere blog. It’s about teaching the Crossed Chord Theorem. It’s one I had forgotten about, if I heard it in the first place. The result is one of those small, neat things and it’s fun to work through how and why it might be true.
Next comes from a comment by Gerry on a rather old article, “What’s The Worst Way To Pack?” Gerry located a conversation on MathOverflow.net that’s about finding low-density packings of discs, circles, on the plane. As these sorts of discussions go, it gets into some questions about just what we mean by packings, and whether Wikipedia has typos. This is normal for discovering new mathematics. We have to spend time pinning down just what we mean to talk about. Then we can maybe figure out what we’re saying.
And the last I picked up from Elke Stangl, of what’s now known as the elkemental Force blog. She had pointed me first to lecture notes from Dr Scott Aaronson which try to explain quantum mechanics from starting principles. Normally, almost invariably, they’re taught in historical sequence. Aaronson here skips all the history to look at what mathematical structures make quantum mechanics make sense. It’s not for casual readers, I’m afraid. It assumes you’re comfortable with things like linear transformations and p-norms. But if you are, then it’s a great overview. I figure to read it over several more times myself.
Those notes are from a class in Quantum Computing. I haven’t had nearly the time to read them all. But the second lecture in the series is on Set Theory. That’s not quite friendly to a lay audience, but it is friendlier, at least.
nebusresearch 