Linkage

A listing of the arXiv preprints with the highest numbers of downloads (above tens of thousands), sorted by category, as of around 2020 (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Obviously this is susceptible to being gamed if you know this is going to be measured, but in the categories I looked at, the listings included many well-known papers (and a few random ones).

An introduction to graph theory (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Free (CC0-licensed) online introductory textbook by Darij Grinberg of Drexel U.

Possibilities of Paper (\(\mathbb{M}\)). A 13-artist exhibition of paperfolding art in Virginia, demonstrating the “possibilities of paper”.

AP News article on overhauling higher education coursework to ward off AI-based cheating (\(\mathbb{M}\), via).

Because of a reviewing backlog drive, I have three more new Wikipedia Good Articles (\(\mathbb{M}\)):

• BIT predicate, a test for whether a specified bit of a given number is set. Useful for membership testing in sets represented as bitmaps.

• Cartesian tree, a binary tree defined from a sequence of numbers by putting the minimum value as the root and recursing in the subsequences to its left and right.

• Herschel graph, the smallest non-Hamiltonian polyhedral graph

Quanta on why it is so hard to prove computational hardness (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Talk slides for “Uniqueness in Puzzles and Puzzle Solving” (\(\mathbb{M}\)), a short talk I recently gave at the ICIAM 2023 Minisymposium on Mathematical Puzzles and Games in Theoretical Computer Science.

“Undulation in Origami Tessellation” (\(\mathbb{M}\)), work by Rinki Imada and Tomohiro Tachi on exhibit at ICIAM 2023, Waseda University. See also their new paper “Undulations in tubular origami tessellations: A connection to area-preserving maps”, Chaos, doi:10.1063/5.0160803.

Talk slides from many of the presentations at WADS and CCCG 2023 (\(\mathbb{M}\)), on algorithms and data structures, and computational geometry, respectively, and notes from the open problem sessions of each conference, are now online. The talks themselves were not recorded.

For accessibility reasons, arXiv is starting to publish HTML versions of papers (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Still in the testing phases and not entirely bug-free.

Greg Egan visualizes “why a celebrity wandering through a mirrored hexagonal room would need 144 bodyguards to block one paparazzo from taking a snap” (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Theorems and Lemmas and Proofs, Oh My! (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Gasarch on the classification and nomenclature of mathematical statements.

Not the net of a regular dodecahedron (\(\mathbb{M}\)). A ten-year-old error on Wikimedia commons finally gets spotted and corrected. In the comments, M.-J. Dominus points to a similarly erroneous image of a Möbius strip with two edges.

Older versions of Springer’s proceedings formatting macros were unable to handle dois for papers in Springer proceedings, because they contain underscores (\(\mathbb{M}\)). I found a StackExchange thread with two workarounds before figuring out the real fix: get rid of the old version of llncs.sty that I had in my personal LaTeX library, shadowing the updated and fixed one in TeX Live.

A distributive lattice of musical modes, partially ordered by brightness, with the lattice operations being note-wise minimum and maximum. If the only two modes you use are the major and minor scales, this isn’t very interesting, but there are many more possibilities.