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# Posts

### March 03, 2015

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After the huge success of last year's event, the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy will be hosting the second installment of its Summer School for female students, from July 26th to August 1st 2015. From the website:The summer school is open to excellent female students who want to specialize in mathematical philosophy. Since women are significantly underrepresented in philosophy generally and in formal philosophy in particular, this summer school is aimed at encouraging women to engage […]

### March 01, 2015

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“Is the Philosophy of Probabilism an Obstacle to Statistical Fraud Busting?” was my presentation at the 2014 Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science):“Revisiting the Foundations of Statistics in the Era of Big Data: Scaling Up to Meet the Challenge.”    As often happens, I never put these slides into a stand alone paper. But I have […]
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Math-Frolic Interview #28                 "...it's time to slay some ghosts and kill some prejudices. Let's admit that any field of human endeavor worth investigating eventually gets to a level of technicality that becomes challenging, and it's fair to say that many people hit that ceiling earlier in mathematics before they do in other, perhaps more verbal, subjects. But before that level
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An article on physicsworld.com reported the discovery of variable stars whose periodic dimming and brightening frequencies have a ratio at or very near the golden ratio. The objects were found in data from the Kepler space telescope by looking for stars with two characteristic pulsation frequencies that have a “golden ratio” of approximately 1.62. The [...]

### February 28, 2015

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Chapter 3. The Logic of Relatives (cont.) §4. Classification of Relatives 225.   Individual relatives are of one or other of the two forms and simple relatives are negatives of one or other of these two forms. 226.   The … Continue reading →

### February 27, 2015

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Re: Helmut Raulien Right, the “divisor of” relation signified by is a dyadic relation on the set of positive integers so it can be understood as a subset of the cartesian product   It is an example of a partial … Continue reading →
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Originally posted on mathbabe:Have you ever heard of phrenology? It was, once upon a time, the “science” of measuring someone’s skull to understand their intellectual capabilities. This sounds totally idiotic but was a huge fucking deal in the mid-1800’s, and really didn’t stop getting some credit until much later. I know that because I…
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Some things that caught my eye this week (when my power was on!): 1)  Evelyn Lamb with some wonderful math history in a few telling letters betwixt Gauss and Sophie Germain: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/2015/02/13/gauss-and-germain-on-pleasure-and-passion/ 2)  Having some fun with Wolfram/Alpha: http://tinyurl.com/jwqb52n https://twitter.com/wacnt 3)  Entertaining

### February 25, 2015

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MONTHLY MEMORY LANE: 3 years ago: February 2012. I am to mark in red three posts (or units) that seem most apt for general background on key issues in this blog. Given our Fisher reblogs, we’ve already seen many this month. So, I’m marking in red (1) The Triad, and (2) the Unit on Spanos’ misspecification tests. Plase see those posts for […]
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The category theory page here has been much expanded with links to (i) some online lecture notes, and (ii) some books which are freely (and legitimately!) available online in one form or another. I am not at all aiming to … Continue reading →

### February 24, 2015

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To the Wigmore Hall again last week to see hear the Pavel Haas Quartet playing Czech music old and new. The most engaging concert, we agreed, that we’d been to for months. To begin, Dvorak’s four Miniatures Op. 75a for … Continue reading →

### February 23, 2015

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Selection from C.S. Peirce, “Logic Of Relatives” (1870), CP 3.45–149 93.   In reference to the doctrine of individuals, two distinctions should be borne in mind.  The logical atom, or term not capable of logical division, must be one of which … Continue reading →
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I wasn’t able to do much work in January for family reasons, but levels of concentration and energy are returning. So, much later than I’d hoped, here at last is an updated version of the Notes on Category Theory (still very partial … Continue reading →

### February 22, 2015

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Selection from C.S. Peirce, “Logic Of Relatives” (1870), CP 3.45–149 92.   Demonstration of the sort called mathematical is founded on suppositions of particular cases.  The geometrician draws a figure;  the algebraist assumes a letter to signify a single quantity fulfilling … Continue reading →
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Math-Frolic Interview #27  "We are all simultaneously experts and beginners, flaunting our talents while trying to cover our shortcomings the way an animal hides a wound. You could call this a 'math blog,' or a 'teaching blog,' but I would call it a blog about owning up to weakness and drawing strength from successes, however transient or trivial they may seem." -- Ben Orlin (from his
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This headliner appeared before, but to a sparse audience, so Management’s giving him another chance… It relates to both Senn’s post (about alternatives), and to my recent post about using (1 – β)/α as a likelihood ratio--but for very different reasons. (I’ll explain in my “(b) draft” of this post; feel free to venture your thoughts.)  ….If you look […]

### February 21, 2015

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The Mathematics Genealogy project is a huge database of mathematicians, where and when they got their degrees, and who their advisors were.  (There's also a wiki-based Philosophy Genealogy.)  Nice pastime when the polar vortex keeps you from leaving the house: find famous people in your academic family tree. If you're in the Mathematics Genealogy, you can use Geneagrapher by David Alber to produce a graphical genealogy.  It's pretty amazing. Here is mine (click for full size): TIL: […]

### February 20, 2015

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Dates: June 10-12, 2015Location: Montpellier, FranceSubmission deadline: April 1, 2015 This workshop aims at promoting work on Hilbert’s epsilon calculus in a number of relevant fields ranging from Philosophy and Mathematics to Linguistics and Informatics. The Epsilon and Tau operators were introduced by David Hilbert, inspired by Russell's Iota operator for definite descriptions, as binding operators that form terms from formulae. One of their main features is that substitution with […]
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See which of these you've missed...: 1)  A Marcus du Sautoy "In Our Time" podcast on the work of Kurt Gödel: https://soundcloud.com/marcusdusautoy/in-our-time-godels-incompleteness-theorem 2)  "Medical research is in bad shape" -- that's the first line in this interesting retrospective of John Ioannidis' crusading work since he first noted 10 years ago that "...most published research findings

### February 19, 2015

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As part the week of recognizing R.A.Fisher (February 17, 1890 – July 29, 1962), I reblog Senn from 3 years ago.   ‘Fisher’s alternative to the alternative’ By: Stephen Senn This year [2012] marks the 50th anniversary of RA Fisher’s death. It is a good excuse, I think, to draw attention to an aspect of his […]

### February 18, 2015

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Here are two ways of looking at the divisibility relation, a dyadic relation of fundamental importance in number theory. Table 1 shows the first few ordered pairs of the relation on positive integers that corresponds to the relative term, “divisor … Continue reading →

### February 17, 2015

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It may help to clarify the relationship between logical relatives and mathematical relations.  The word relative as used in logic is short for relative term — as such it refers to an article of language that is used to denote … Continue reading →
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Sign relations are just special cases of triadic relations, in much the same way that binary operations in mathematics are special cases of triadic relations.  It does amount to a minor complication that we participate in sign relations whenever we … Continue reading →
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In recognition of R.A. Fisher’s birthday…. ‘R. A. Fisher: How an Outsider Revolutionized Statistics’ by Aris Spanos Few statisticians will dispute that R. A. Fisher (February 17, 1890 – July 29, 1962) is the father of modern statistics; see Savage (1976), Rao (1992). Inspired by William Gosset’s (1908) paper on the Student’s t finite sampling […]

### February 16, 2015

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My post “What’s wrong with taking (1 – β)/α, as a likelihood ratio comparing H0 and H1?” gave rise to a set of comments that were mostly off topic but interesting in their own right. Being too long to follow, I put what appears to be the last group of comments here, starting with Matloff’s query. […]
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In recognition of R.A. Fisher’s birthday tomorrow, I will post several entries on him. I find this (1934) paper to be intriguing –immediately before the conflicts with Neyman and Pearson erupted. It represents essentially the last time he could take their work at face value, without the professional animosities that almost entirely caused, rather than being caused by, the apparent […]
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Chapter 3. The Logic of Relatives (cont.) §2. Relatives (concl.) 222.   Instead of considering the system of a relative as consisting of non-relative individuals, we may conceive of it as consisting of relative individuals.  Thus, since we have But … Continue reading →

### February 15, 2015

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Chapter 3. The Logic of Relatives (cont.) §2. Relatives (cont.) 221.   From the definition of a simple term given in the last section, it follows that every simple relative is the negative of an individual term.  But while in … Continue reading →
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When I was in college (in the ’80s) the question why humans outperform computers in image recognition already was receiving some attention. At the time an idea came to me, and it still seems relevant enough to write down. No … Continue reading →
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"Mathematics Without Apologies" by Michael Harris....  "Insofar as the present book is about anything, it is about how it feels to live a mathematician's double life: one life within this framework of professional autonomy, answerable only to our colleagues, and the other life in the world at large." -- Michael Harris "...the only way somebody can be a scientist is that somehow their