Linkage

We’ve already seen AI-generated peer-review for Wikipedia articles (\(\mathbb{M}\)), with such brilliant insight as:

This article is extensive in its coverage of such a rich topic as Ontario Highway 11. It addresses the main points of Ontario Highway 11 in a way that isn’t just understandable to a reader, but also relatable. While Ontario Highway 11 is brimming with fascinating background trivia, the article does a great job staying focused on the topic of Ontario Highway 11 without going into unnecessary detail that isn’t directly related to Ontario Highway 11. Neutral point of view without bias is maintained perfectly in this article, despite Ontario Highway 11 being such a contentious and controversial topic. Images are truly beautiful and done with expert photographic skill. They definitely enhance the reader’s understanding of Ontario Highway 11. Without them, I wouldn’t have any idea what the highway looks like. But thanks to these wonderful images, I now understand that Ontario Highway 11 is a paved road that vehicles use to travel.

I originally asked, how long before this spreads to journal referee reports? But from second-hand reports in the comments, this has also happened already.

San Francisco’s move to prevent talented high school students from taking advanced mathematics early, pushed hard by educationist Jo Boaler with the ostensible goal of improving disparities in schooling, has predictably failed to improve the ethnic and socioeconomic balance of the city’s advanced mathematics courses (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). Instead, “Families face a nightmare of workarounds to get their high-achieving children on track for advanced math”, more easily navigable by the already-privileged.

A signal failure stalled GPS-dependent tractors across farms in Australia and New Zealand (\(\mathbb{M}\), via), after one of the Inmarsat satellites providing accuracy enhancements to GPS in that part of the earth stopped working correctly. The satellite is back after an over-24-hour outage but this event “is prompting farmers and industry groups to examine their backup systems for the technology they are using”.

Math StackExchange report by Mark Dominus: “simplest-possible examples, pointy regions, and nearly-orthogonal vectors”. Also with discussion about what kind of answers get upvoted (not the deepest and most insightful!) and on the value of asking poorly-formulated questions.

Danpiker asks: In how many different ways can \(n\) circles be linked in \(\mathbb{R}^3\)? It’s not even entirely clear what the definition of “different” should be, and Ian Agol points out in the comments that even great circles in \(\mathbb{S}^3\) are as-yet unclassified, pointing to Genevieve Walsh’s dissertation on the subject.

Math breakthrough inspires local educator (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Profile in the Salem Reporter of Sophia Wood aka Fractal Kitty and her mathematics-inspired crafts.

There are cubic graphs that cannot be partitioned into connected subgraphs of two and four vertices. However, every cubic graph with \(3n\) vertices can be partitioned into subgraphs of size \(n\) without isolated vertices. The proof involves partitioning into connected subgraphs of two and three vertices, with at most one four-vertex subgraph and at least four two-vertex subgraphs, grouping these into six-vertex subgraphs, and then breaking up one or two of the six-vertex subgraphs as needed to even out the three-way partition.

A confluent drawing style, in which vertices are connected by systems of “tracks” and are adjacent when there is a smooth curve connecting them through these tracks, allows the Chvátal graph to be drawn with only a single crossing (\(\mathbb{M}\)):

Ukrainian team wins European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

A seven-piece dissection of a \(3\times 3\times 3\) cube into polycubes with a unique solution, leading to some discussion of what it means for the solution of a dissection puzzle to be unique.

xkcd 2769, “Overlapping Circles” is surprisingly inaccurate (\(\mathbb{M}\)). The people interested in the overlapping circle shape depicted are not just set theorists and astronomers; they also include geometers, scholars of Gothic architecture, and mystics.

Ancient Roman hyperbolic tessellation from Lugdunum Musee de Lyon (France).

Wiley fires an editor of a philosophy journal (\(\mathbb{M}\), via), apparently for refusing to produce tenfold increases in the number of papers it publishes.

A bug in a 2008 conference paper on simplified fast modular decomposition of graphs leads to the question: what is the right way to correct the record when old conference papers are found to be buggy?