Linkage

Proceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2019) (\(\mathbb{M}\)). As in recent years, Graph Drawing is making an open-access version of their complete proceedings through arXiv, mirroring (except for minor typographic details) the official proceedings to be published through Springer LNCS. One advantage of the arXiv version is that in many cases appendices or longer versions of the papers are also available.

Look at all the triangulated (hemi)spheres! (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Sadly this aerial view of the National Library of Kosovo did not pass its nomination as an English Wikipedia featured picture.

Christian Lawson-Perfect tries to visualize the concept of non-Hamiltonicity by sending flocks of arrowheads tracing around paths in the Herschel graph but without ever closing up to form a cycle.

Millions of books published from 1923 to 1964 didn’t have their copyright renewed, putting them in the public domain in the US. Libraries and the Internet Archive are collaborating to scan them and put them online (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). See also the NYPL blog for more technical details about the efforts to determine the non-renewal status of these books.

Programmable kirigami (\(\mathbb{M}\), via, original research paper). Harvard researchers use numerical optimization to design slit cutting patterns and hinged unfoldings that allow sheets of material to expand from one given shape to another.

White nationalists use the abbreviation SPQR (Sono Pazzi Questi Romani!) thinking it refers to the Roman military. Classics scholars set them straight (\(\mathbb{M}\)). As the same abbreviation is widely used in graph drawing for a data structure to describe 3-connected components and planar embeddings I think it’s important to pay attention to these darker shifts in popular usage.

Scott Aaronson’s Quantum Supremacy FAQ (\(\mathbb{M}\)). The story Scott’s responding to is not yet properly published in peer-reviewed sources, but the scoop-hungry journalists say that Google has demonstrated their 50-something-qbit machines to be truly quantum. This seems like pretty big news from the quantum computing world even though it’s still a long way from there to breaking RSA.

Embedding a Sierpiński tetrahedron onto a king’s graph (\(\mathbb{M}\)):

Jessica Wynne’s forthcoming book “Do Not Erase”, her collection of photographs of mathematical blackboards, looks fascinating (\(\mathbb{M}\), discussion, see also). There’s also an NYT article but I’m not linking it because they were too sniffy about reading their site in incognito mode.

My God, It’s Full of Dots! (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Brian Hayes plays with the fractal circle packings of the plane (or of a region of the plane) that you get from a greedy process of picking random points and using either the maximum radius possible or the next radius on a given sequence of radii (but then only adding a circle if that radius fits).

Is the increasing use of Google Scholar causing citations to be concentrated more heavily on a smaller number of highly-cited papers? (\(\mathbb{M}\), via).

Leading Chinese American scholars decry racial profiling from Trump’s hard-line policies against China (\(\mathbb{M}\)). You know how the US took over as a leader in mathematics and science from Germany in the 1930s-1940s because the Nazis were already driving away their best Jewish scientists, long before they became completely genocidal? This feels kind of similar.

150 women in 150 words (\(\mathbb{M}\)). The Royal Society of New Zealand celebrates its 150th anniversary by highlighting the contributions of women in New Zealand to scientific knowledge.