Linkage

Do you suffer from FWOOWMP? This video is a couple years old, but may be useful for sharing with students at the start of the term, to cut through their intimidation with some humor and encourage them to take advantage of faculty office hours.

What is a physicist? A mathematician? A computer scientist? (G+). After Scott Aaronson called himself “not a physicist” despite recently winning a physics prize, Bill Gasarch posted this piece on how we identify ourselves. Similarly, at Alice Silverberg’s 60th birthday conference, Kristin Lauter pointed out the differences between cryptographic number theorists and number theoretic cryptographers, in noting that one of Alice’s strengths has been bringing these two communities together.

Möbius Cellular Automaton Scarf (G+) by Elisabetta Matsumoto, Henry Segerman, and Fabienne Serriere from the Bridges 2018 art gallery. The part that raises this above the level of “just another use of cellular automata to create decorative patterns” is that they carried out a search for an initial seed pattern that would return to itself, in reversed form, at the right length to make the pattern seamless.

Branko Grünbaum (1929–2018) (G+). Sad news from the University of Washington of Grünbaum’s death, in the same week that we learn the sad news from New York of Ricky Pollack’s death.

Why Jess Wade and Maryam Zaringhalam are editing women scientists onto Wikipedia and why you should too.

Why the brain is not folded like a crumpled sheet of paper (G+). Counterpoint to a link I posted three years ago.

There Are More Things (G+). Intricate knotwork patterns by Taneli Luotoniemi.

Alison Grace Martin falsely suspended as a spammer (G+). Eventually her posts were restored, but this scare (and similar instances for other legitimate posters) calls into question the reliability and free availability of Google+. In the comments, Jürgen Christoffel suggests using Google Takeout to make a local backup of your Google data (always a good idea even without this event to warn us).

How steel ribbons are shaped into cookie cutters (via). This leads me to wonder which shapes can be formed in this way by hammers that come in from converging angles. I think the answer is that it’s possible as long as, when you walk around the boundary, you never turn backwards more than π from a previous angle. If so, this should be easy to check algorithmically.

Women in Mathematics Throughout Europe, An Exhibition. The Heidelberg Laureate Forum profiles 13 European women mathematicians.

Hamonshū. Mori Yuzan’s 1903 guide to wave designs is now online.

Southern California Theory Day 2018 (G+). A day of theoretical CS talks to be held November 3 at UC Irvine. Speakers are Umesh Vazirani, Alon Orlitsky, Ashutosh Kumar, Anima Anandkumar, Silas Richelson, Ben Lee Volk, and me.

Tetris and the curious case of simple questions with tough answers. Mira Shalah, a student of Gill Barequet at the Technion and, according to the linked article, “one of the first Israeli-Arab women to earn a PhD in computer science”, gets a nice writeup of her work on counting polyominoes.

Final report from the Ad hoc committee to Combat Harassment and Discrimination in the Theory of Computing Community. Recommendations include codes of conduct for conferences, a group of trained advocates, the ability to declare conflicts of interest for harassment against potential reviewers without having to make public accusations against them, and community education.

Mathematics genealogy visualization (G+, via). One of this year’s Graph Drawing Contest winners.