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# Posts

### March 27, 2015

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Part of the original intent for this blog was to accompany the evolutionary game theory reading group that I started running at McGill in 2010. The blog has taken off, but the reading group has waned. However, since I still have some hope to revive a regular reading group, I have continued to call occasional […]
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guest post by David Spivak The problem The idea that’s haunted me, and motivated me, for the past seven years or so came to me while reading a book called The Moment of Complexity: our Emerging Network Culture, by Mark C. Taylor. It was a fascinating book about how our world is becoming increasingly networked—wired […]

### March 26, 2015

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Starting grad school has been a bit of a roller coaster and everyone seems to say that the first year is the hardest. So far, I still enjoy showing up everyday so here is a list of advice I have … Continue reading →
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John Nash will receive the 2015 Abel Prize (the most prestigious prize in mathematics besides the Fields Medal). The Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters is awarding the prize not for Nash’s work on game theory, but for his (and Louis Nirenberg’s) “striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and […]

### March 25, 2015

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It is Monday afternoon and the day seems to be a productive one, if not yet quite memorable. As I revise some notes on my desk, Beni Yoshida walks into my office to remind me that the high-energy physics seminar … Continue reading →
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Both the Turing Award and the Abel Prize were announced this morning. MIT databases researcher Michael Stonebraker wins the ACM Turing Award. He developed INGRES one of the first relational databases. Stonebraker is the first Turing award winner since the prize went up to a cool million dollars. John Nash and Louis Nirenberg share this years Abel Prize “for striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to […]
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Last summer I gave a mini-course on the Sum of Squares algorithm in the Swedish Summer School of Computer Science. It was a great experience – the venue was  Djurönäset  – a hotel in the beautiful Stockholm archipelgo with stunning views and great food. It was organized very smoothly by Jakob Nordström, Per Austrin, and Johan Håstad, […]
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Doug Ravenel has made his book Nilpotence and periodicity in stable homotopy theory available for free download along with a list of errata, also available at this link. Here is the official description from Princeton University Press: Nilpotence and Periodicity in Stable Homotopy Theory describes some major advances made in algebraic topology in recent years, […]
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http://t.co/rTEYZLbVDZ by @ulaulaman about #AbelPrize #LouisNirenberg Great news: John Nash and Louis Nirenberg win the Abel Prize for 2015: The Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters has decided to award the Abel Prize for 2015 to the American mathematicians John F. Nash Jr. and Louis Nirenberg “for striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis.” The President of the Academy, Kirsti Strøm Bull, […]
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Our paper “Local and nonlocal dynamics in superfluid turbulence” has now been published in PRB, and can be found at: https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.91.104517 Our from my publications page: http://abag.wikidot.com/publications An intersting complementary study (which I only became aware of today) was also published in PRB last year: http://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.90.144511
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This question comes from a comment on another post: I’ve seen authors citing as many references as possible to try to please potential referees. Many of those references are low quality papers though. Any general guidance about a typical length for the reference section? It depends on the subject and style of the paper. I’ve […]

### March 24, 2015

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Una definizione della #matematica ad opera di #EugeneWignerQualcuno una volta ha detto che la filosofia è l'uso improprio di una terminologia che è stata inventata proprio per questo proposito(1). Allo stesso modo, direi che la matematica è la scienza delle operazioni esperte con concetti e ruoli inventati proprio per questo scopo. La principale enfasi è sull'invenzione dei concetti. La matematica resterebbe presto a corto di teoremi interessanti se questi dovessero essere formulati in […]
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Modern pure mathematics is characterized by the rigour of its methods, and by its special subject matter, i.e. abstract structures. Or so the story goes. But exactly what is meant by rigour here? What, exactly, is meant by saying that modern mathematics … Continue reading →
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guest post by Marc Harper A while back, in the article Relative entropy minimization in evolutionary dynamics, we looked at extensions of the information geometry / evolutionary game theory story to more general time-scales, incentives, and geometries. Today we’ll see how to make this all work in finite populations! Let’s recall the basic idea from […]
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MONTHLY MEMORY LANE: 3 years ago: March 2012. I mark in red three posts that seem most apt for general background on key issues in this blog. (Posts that are part of a “unit” or a group of “U-Phils” count as one.) This new feature, appearing the last week of each month, began at the blog’s 3-year anniversary in Sept, 2014. Since the 3/14 and 3/18 […]
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We are now advertising for various positions in applied statistics, operations research and applied mathematics. Click here for details These jobs are with MAXIMA (the Monash Academy for Cross & Interdisciplinary Mathematical Applications). Please do not send any questions to me (I won’t answer). Click above and fol­low the instructions.
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See here. NSF-sponsored papers should be freely available no more than 12 months after publication in a journal. This is not perfect, but a step in the right direction. Computer scientists should insist that conference proceedings are treated the same way, and made freely available no more than 12 months after publication. Hat tip: Lance Fortnow.
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It is time — this is the 201st article on TheEGG — to get an update on readership since our 151st post and lament on why academics should blog. I apologize for this naval-gazing post, and it is probably of no interest to you unless you are really excited about blog statistics. I am writing […]

### March 23, 2015

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Volevo scattare una #fotografia per parlare di #composizione e #linee. Invece...Scattare una fotografia è semplice: punti e premi il pulsante della camera, o spingi il dito sullo schermo del cellulare multifunzione che hai in tasca.Scattare una fotografia è complesso: bisogna decidere come ritrarre, su cosa puntare l'attenzione, come sfruttare al meglio l'ambiente circostante.Scattare una fotografia serve per raccontare, situazioni, ambienti, stati d'animo. La parte difficile nello scattare […]
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Thanks for your concerned emails.  No, I have not been run over by a bus, just crazy busy with no time for new posts in the past few weeks.  We'll see how the next few go.  Meanwhile, here's the latest tennis graphic.  It's now dynamic; when it stops playing, just click on it to blow it up and re-play.This graphic is for yesterday's Indian Wells Championship.  To really feel the drama, you'll want the slower animation.  I'll post on my web page one of these […]
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Let \$X\$ be a set of vectors in \$\mathbb{R}^d\$.  Three important objects related to \$X\$ are the cone, lattice, and integer cone generated by \$X\$.  These are (respectively), the set of all real non-negative combinations, the set of all integer combinations, and the set … Continue reading →
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(I was going to call this entry  Who was the worst mathematician of all time? but Clyde Kruskal reminded me that its not (say) Goldbach's fault that his conjecture got so well known, in fact its a good thing! I'll come back to Goldbach later.) Would Hawking be as well known if he didn't have ALS?  I suspect that within Physics yes, but I doubt he would have had guest shots on ST:TNG, The Simpsons, Futurama, and The Big Bang Theory (I just checked the IDMB database- they don't […]

### March 22, 2015

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Fascinating! Found -starting from this issue https://github.com/PeerJ/paper-now/issues/2 which proposes hypothes.is – via the roadmap https://hypothes.is/roadmap/ – via the issue https://github.com/hypothesis/vision/issues/87 this: [1305.3506] Micropublications: a Semantic Model for Claims, Evidence, Arguments and Annotations in Biomedical Communications Read and spread it if you think is interesting.  I do because of what I want: a realization of the … Continue reading […]
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SageMath has, once again, be selected as one of the mentoring organizations for the Google Summer of Code. This means any student, undergrad or PhD anywhere in the world, can spend the summer improving and extending the functionality of SageMath, while … Continue reading →
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Re: Peirce List Discussion • Howard Pattee At this point we can distinguish two forms of decomposability or reducibility — along with their corresponding negations, indecomposability or irreducibility – that commonly arise. Reducibility under relational composition All triadic relations are … Continue reading →
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Oggi, in occasione della giornata internazionale dell'acqua (leggi anche OggiScienza), recupero un estratto (modificato) di un post dedicato alla storia Zio Paperone e la grande avventura acquatica di Valentina Camerini e Marco MazzarelloI protagonisti della storia sono Archimede Pitagorico accompagnato da Paperone e da Paperinik. I tre paperi, mentre stanno rimpicciolendo alcuni iceberg, vengono per sbaglio ridotti a dimensioni atomiche dall'ultima invenzione di Archimede, riducendosi fino […]
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Durante le mie vacanze estive ho girato poco per librerie. Anzi, purtroppo sono andata in libreria solo due volte, delle quali una molto veloce. Però, nel mio primo giro, oltre un libro per bambini, ho acquistato due libri anche per me, uno dei quali è il seguito di "Agnes Browne mamma". La curiosità di sapere come sono continuate le vite della famiglia Browne era troppo grande!Agnes Browne ha continuato la sua vita di mamma/papà e venditrice di frutta e verdura al mercato; i figli sono […]
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In my new Wikipedia article on the queue number of graphs, the binary de Bruijn graphs form an important family of examples. These are 4-regular graphs with one vertex for every n-bit binary string, and with an edge from every string of the form 0s or 1s to s0 or s1. I posted about them here several years ago, with the following drawing, which can be interpreted as a 2-queue drawing with one queue for the edges that wrap around the left side and another for the edges that wrap around the […]

### March 21, 2015

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foto di Luca Di FinoQuando il saggio indica la luna, lo stolto guarda l'eclissi. E si brucia la retina. E il saggio si ammazza dalle risate.Enrico MiceliDopo le foto di ieri, una raccolta di tweet e link e citazioni. Iniziamo con una serie di tweet di Giorgio Sestili segnalati da Luca Di Fino:Pensate alle popolazioni passate, che nulla sapevano sull'eclissi e sul moto dei pianeti. Improvvisamente, in pieno giorno, il buio! [1]Presagi funesti, segni anticipatori di sventure, sovvertimento […]
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For the first time since living in the US, we put together a haft seen ( هفت‌ سین : seven S’s) table! It has: center: garlic (sir / سیر) left: lentil sprouts (sabzeh / سبزه) counterclockwise: apple (sib / سیب), wild olive / oleaster (senjed / سنجد), vinegar (serkeh / سرکه), wheat germ pudding (samanoo / سمنو), and […]