Saunders Mac Lane,
mathematician,
has died, age 95. Winner of the National Medal of Science, Vice-President of the National Academy of Science, President of the American Mathematical Society, author of three of the
canonical texts in
algebra [reg. maybe req., here's a local copy], Mac Lane was also mathematical ancestor to
over a thousand mathematicians, father of
category theory and
homological algebra, and expert in
topology,
topos theory, group cohomology, logic, and applied mathematics. He was one of the towering figures of postwar mathematics. Remembered by
his students and all of us who were affected by his work and his life.
posted by gleuschk
on Apr 22, 2005 -
7 comments
The Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota, while now closed, maintains an awesome website with tons of math resources.
I like
sphere eversion, i.e. turning a sphere inside out. Link is to script of video, which explains things pretty well. Here is a
clip [QT]. Also good:
notes from a class on geometry and the imagination that John Conway and some friends gave awhile back. Old but good.
posted by mai
on Mar 1, 2005 -
3 comments
Hypothesis as thought-crime ...Now, however, a new brouhaha has erupted [at Harvard]and it seems impossible that Summers [the president]will emerge from this one without serious erosion of his moral authority. The trigger was a statement he made at a conference, suggesting that the reason there are more men than women in the mathematical sciences at top-flight institutions has to do with a small statistical difference in inate ability, which becomes a pretty large disparity when one looks at the 'high end' of the respective distribution curves...
The fatal words did not set forth his main theme, but merely constituted a brief aside, thoroughly hedged and qualified. Nonetheless, they touched off a firestorm of indignation, the most striking aspect of which was the intemperate response of a number of feminist scientists, who offered no counter-arguments, but simply declared the whole idea misogynistic and therefore forbidden intellectual territory.
posted by Postroad
on Jan 31, 2005 -
71 comments
From MathNet to that silly song about the number nine,
Square One was one of my all-time favourite programs as a kid. It hasn't been released on video or DVD, but luckily there are
plenty of fansites with video clips, pics, and other media to take you on a trip down mathematical memory lane.
posted by sanitycheck
on Jan 18, 2005 -
25 comments
The Mathematics Genealogy Project. A service of the
Department of Mathematics at
North Dakota State University, the project intends to "compile information about ALL the mathematicians of the world. [...] It is our goal to list all individuals who have received a doctorate in mathematics." Seven generations from one of my recent professors back to
Gauss, six back to
Felix Klein (of
Erlangen Program and
bottle fame), eight back to
Jacobi, and nine back to
Poisson and
Fourier, then
Lagrange, then
Euler, then
the Bernoulli brothers, then
Leibniz, and then it blew up at infinity.
posted by gramschmidt
on Dec 21, 2004 -
5 comments
Su Doku. Fill in the grid so that every row, every column, and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 through 9. That's all there is to it. It doesn't sound like much, but it's as addictive as hell.
The Times is one publication with a daily puzzle (may be unavailable to overseas readers.) There a tuturial and sample puzzle
here (flash).
posted by salmacis
on Dec 10, 2004 -
6 comments
Mathematics and art are thoroughly explored as two intertwined fields, in this online version of a Dartmouth course focusing on patterns [more inside].
posted by edlundart
on Oct 29, 2003 -
10 comments
