Linkage
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2018 is the last year of America’s public domain drought (G+, via). Or would be the last, before Disney buys enough legislators to keep Mickey and Pooh locked up for another term. See also BoingBoing on why another copyright extension might not happen.
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Robert McCallum’s claimed proof that Reinhardt cardinals are inconsistent with ZF and Joel Hamkins’ discussion post on the proof (G+, via). If it holds up this result would be big; this is also an interesting example of online and public peer-review of preprints. But Hamkins worries that this process may be too stressful to authors.
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The dripping and undulating ceramic sculptures of Toru Kurokawa (G+, via). In the comments, Roice Nelson suggests a resemblance to Lawson’s minimal surfaces.
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A reminder that I am not refereeing for Elsevier, an update on the German university negotiations with Elsevier, and a story about Elsevier being slow to act on reports of fake reviewers (G+).
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Teaching doctoral students how to write for other specialists in their field doesn’t prepare them to write for a broader audience. This is aimed at humanities students but applies equally well to more technical disciplines.
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Double blind reviewing in ALENEX 2018. See also Michael Mitzenmacher’s take on the subject.
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More charts and figures than you probably care to see about the growth of arXiv (G+). The data structures and algorithms section is growing, but less rapidly than CS more generally.
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Vi Hart and Matt Parker win the 2018 JPBM Communications Awards; Anna Haensch writes about how they have elevated the art of mathematical communication (via).
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The square-sum problem (G+, via). A cute number-theoretic Hamiltonian path puzzle with an associated open problem: does this work for all sufficiently large numbers? See also MathOverflow on the connectivity of higher-order power-sum graphs.
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By Monsky’s theorem one cannot divide a square into an odd number of equal-area triangles, but it’s possible to use the Thue–Morse sequence to get superpolynomially close to equal areas (G+). See also John Baez’s more detailed post on the same topic.
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Crinkled torus folded from a single rectangular sheet of paper by William T. Webber (G+). This one looks a little warped, but it should be possible to create tori in this way whose geometry is exact (congruent flat triangles everywhere, with angles adding to exactly 2π at each vertex). On the other hand, I’m not convinced that it’s possible to get a torus that closes up exactly using equilateral triangles that meet six at a vertex; see my older post for more.
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New York City establishes a task force to look into issues of algorithmic fairness (G+, via) but pushback from industry and staff is preventing them from seeing source code or even finding out which agencies use code to make resource allocation decisions. And if they saw the code, would they be able to figure out whether it makes its decisions fairly?