Linkage

Let’s not dumb down the history of computer science (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). A 2014 plea from Knuth to historians of computer science to stop ignoring the technical parts of the history, reprinted this month in CACM.

Studies in ethical surrealism: the runaway lobster telephone problem (\(\mathbb{M}\)). I was pleased to learn that the lobster telephone depicted in this cartoon is a real objet d’art.

Archive of back issues of Eureka (\(\mathbb{M}\), via), the recreational mathematics journal of the Cambridge Archimedeans, now online for open access. On Wikipedia, the popular articles from Eureka appear to be Dyson’s work on ranks of partitions, in #8, Haselgrove & Haselgrove on polyominoes, in #23, Penrose on pentaplexity, in #39, and Leinster on his eponymous groups, in #55.

In a new book chapter, Susanne Bobzien claims that famous philosopher of logic Gottlob Frege plagiarized extensively from the Stoic logicians (\(\mathbb{M}\), via, via2, see also).

How did I not know about the Condorcet Internet Voting Service before (\(\mathbb{M}\))? Set up public or private polls and collate the results with your favorite Condorcet rank aggregation method (at least, if your favorite is one of the five they implement, which it probably is). Their public polls are kind of insipid, though, and in comments David Bremner brings up their past history of enabling online abusers.

Perkel’s graph and the 57-cell, multi-post sequence on an abstract 4-polytope and associated distance-regular graph, by Refurio Anachro.

The Victoria Delfino Problems (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Bill Gasarch blogs about mathematics problems named after non-mathematicians, in this case a Los Angeles based real estate agent.

The speech recognition system Zoom and/or my university are using to auto-caption my recorded lectures (whatever it is) really doesn’t like the word “bipartite”, heavily used in my lecture on matching (\(\mathbb{M}\)). It came out “bipartisan”, “invite part tight”, “by party”, “by protect”, “by apartheid”, “by part aight”, and “by partnership”. Also “spanning forest” is now “Hispanic forest”, but mysteriously it got “spanning tree” right.

20 ways to spot the work of paper mills (\(\mathbb{M}\)). However one, using a non-institutional email address, is not “a bad global habit”, but deliberate. I have no thought of moving but do not want my entire professional life tied by email to my employer. My UCI address keeps student emails private but I tend to use gmail for off-campus concerns such as publishers. And not all scholars have institutions who can provide emails. If they refuse my email, I refuse to publish with them.

Ben Green presents super-polynomial lower bounds for off-diagonal van der Waerden numbers \(W(3,k)\) (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). \(W(3,k)\) is the smallest \(N\) such that a 2-coloring of \([N]\) has a 3-term arithmetic progression of one color or a \(k\)-term progression of the other. It was previously known to be subexponential and thought to be only quadratic.

The compound of an 11-simplex in an 11-hypercube (as a subset of its vertices) has the Mathieu group M11 as its symmetries (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). The via link goes on to describe how to find two dual 11-simplices in the same hypercube from the perfect ternary Golay code, much like the two simplices in a 3-cube that form the stella octangula.

Self-organizing textures (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). A small input image + “neural cellular automata” magic leads to organic-looking image textures.

Accepted papers for the Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG; \(\mathbb{M}\)). Decisions are out for the Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) but I haven’t seen a public list yet. Upcoming submission deadlines include the Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium (WADS, Feb. 20), Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science (WG, Mar. 3), and the new SIAM Conference on Applied and Computational Discrete Algorithms (ACDA21, Mar. 1).

A new contribution of Hypatia to mathematics (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Not the ancient Hypatia, but Hypatia Hamkins, and her parents, philosopher Barbara Gail Montero and logician Joel David Hamkins; the contribution is a verse proof of the irrationality of \(\sqrt{2}\).

Computational Geometry YouTube channel (\(\mathbb{M}\)). This has been set up by Sariel Har-Peled and Sándor Fekete, and is recording talks from the New York Geometry Seminar. So far there are eleven, of roughly an hour length each.