Linkage for the end of the year
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LaTeX, the game (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). It should be an even higher level to get the commutative diagram to format in Wikipedia’s lobotomized version of LaTeX.
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Byrne’s Euclid recreated for the web (\(\mathbb{M}\), G+, via). Beautiful three-color figures, hard-to-read old-faſhioned orthography, and all. I have the Taſchen reprint in my office, but I prefer the Dover Heath edition for actually uſing the books rather than looking pretty.
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Electric eel inspires biocompatible hydrogel battery (\(\mathbb{M}\), original paper, see also). The part that caught my attention is that they’re using a Miura fold to simultaneously align and press together many pairs of droplets of four types (salty, fresh water, or two kinds of charge-selective hydrogel), creating an origami-activated electrical discharge.
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In the universe of equations, virtually all are prime (\(\mathbb{M}\), G+, original paper). Choose a polynomial’s coefficients randomly and independently from your favorite nontrivial distribution. Then it should be irreducible with high probability for polynomials of high enough degree. This was previously conjectured for the uniform distribution on \(\{0,1\}\) by Odlyzko and Poonen; now Breuillard and Varjú have proven that it follows from a form of the Riemann hypothesis.
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A tricky Sudoku (\(\mathbb{M}\), G+):
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UCLA suggests that its faculty refrain from publishing with or reviewing for Elsevier while negotiations are ongoing (\(\mathbb{M}\)). For those willing to take a longer-term stand, there’s always thecostofknowledge.com.
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A161330 Snowflake (\(\mathbb{M}\)). An animated holiday greeting from Jukka Suomela based on integer sequence A161330.
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Festive two-to-one star dissection (\(\mathbb{M}\)). A Christmas greeting from @unknown@mathstodon.xyz.
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Journeys of women in mathematics (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). A 20-minute documentary profiling three women mathematicians from developing countries: Neela Nataraj of IIT Bombay in India, Aminatou Pecha Nijahouo from Cameroon, and Carolina Araujo at IMPA in Brazil, with brief quotes from many more.
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Three things I learned as a Wiki scholar (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). Historian Rachel Boyle on some cultural differences between academia and Wikipedia.
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Mendocino Beacon Building (\(\mathbb{M}\)). It feels like I haven’t been taking and posting enough photos. So here’s a cell phone shot that I took to illustrate the Wikipedia article on the Mendocino Beacon. The Beacon hasn’t actually lived there for nearly 20 years, but their old sign still hangs on the building.
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Algorithms (\(\mathbb{M}\), G+, via). Jeff Erickson’s open-licensed algorithms text is finally more-or-less complete and available in prepublication form.
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Using unfolded polyhedra to catch and later release deep-sea creatures without harming them (\(\mathbb{M}\), via).
