Linkage

More Google+ links from the last couple of weeks:

An interview with Haida artist Jim Hart
Persi Diaconis discusses mathematics and magic (G+)
A still-unsolved question about whether it's possible to compute edit distance in sublinear space and polynomial time
A New York Times story about how scheduling software makes part-time workers' lives harder. Or does it? The MF discussion of the article makes it clear that managers have been doing the same things with lower tech for a long time. (G+)
Kerfuffle over SoCG colocation with STOC, later resolved (G+)
Barrier resilience on Wikipedia (G+)
Robert Lang talks about the way mathematics done purely for its aesthetic value (in this case mathematical origami) can turn around and have practical applications.
The Troll Slayer. New Yorker profile of classics professor Mary Beard, who knows better than most exactly how long men have been silencing women. (G+)
A study on how social media causes us to self-censor our opinions
My UCI colleague Scott Jordan takes a position advising the FCC about net neutrality
Sculpture by Zachary Abel, one of my new co-authors on the flat-folding paper

Comments:

hawkeye7: 2014-09-01T22:43:57Z Oh wow! You're still here! I was updating the Wikipedia article on Richard Hamming, and was searching for information on Hamming's Problem. If you have any idea where to find information in it (like why it is associated with hamming), please let me know.

11011110: 2014-09-01T23:00:29Z

The earliest reference I know for the attribution of the problem to Hamming is http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd07xx/EWD792.PDF (Dijkstra 1981) — if you have anything earlier I'd be interested in seeing it.

Edited to add: this is also in Dijkstra's 1976 book A Discipline of Programming: see http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~cs410aph/Lectures/Smalltalk%20II/Dijkstra%20on%20Hamming's%20Problem.pdf

There are earlier publications on closely related problems of algorithmically generating 5-smooth numbers but without the reference to Hamming; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_number#Algorithms for details.