Can’t deny that I will sometimes stockpile links of mathematics stuff to talk about. Sometimes I even remember to post it. Sometimes it’s a tweet like this, which apparently I’ve been carrying around since April:
I admit I do not know whether the claim is true. It’s plausible enough. English has many variants in England alone, and any trade will pick up its own specialized jargon. The words are fun as it is.
From the American Mathematical Society there’s this:
I talk a good bit about knot theory. It captures the imagination and it’s good for people who like to doodle. And it has a lot of real-world applications. Tangled wires, protein strands, high-energy plasmas, they all have knots in them. Some work by Paul Sutcliffe and Fabian Maucher, both of Durham University, studies tangled vortices. These are vortices that are, er, tangled together, just like you imagine. Knot theory tells us much about this kind of vortex. And it turns out these tangled vortices can untangle themselves and smooth out again, even without something to break them up and rebuild them. It gives hope for power cords everywhere.
Nerds have a streak which compels them to make blueprints of things. It can be part of the healthier side of nerd culture, the one that celebrates everything. The side that tries to fill in the real-world things that the thing-celebrated would have if it existed. So here’s a bit of news about doing that:
I like the attempt to map Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. It’s a fun exercise in matching stuff to a thin set of data. But as mentioned in the article, nobody should take it too seriously. The exact arrangement of things in Utopia isn’t the point of the book. More probably didn’t have a map for it himself.
(Although maybe. I believe I got this from Simon Garfield’s On The Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration Of The Way The World Looks and apologize generally if I’ve got it wrong. My understanding is Robert Louis Stevenson drew a map of Treasure Island and used it to make sure references in the book were consistent. Then the map was lost in the mail to his publishers. He had to read his text and re-create it as best he could. Which, if true, makes the map all the better. It makes it so good a lost-map story that I start instinctively to doubt it; it’s so colorfully perfect, after all.)
And finally there’s this gem from the Magic Realism Bot:
Happy reading.
nebusresearch 