Index Card Notes
A friend sent me an email with “regretfully” where he should have put “regrettably”. No big deal. He’s not a native English speaker, and these fine points are tricky. It did, however, get me thinking of the old debate about … Continue reading →
Harvard recently hosted an Undergraduate Math Modernization Summit on the challenge of reinventing undergraduate mathematics education for the AI era. How to move past a curriculum still rooted in the 1950s and 1960s? In an article in the Harvard Gazette, … Continue reading →
Kate, a perfectionist, has published Silence: A Literary History. A friend read the book and found just one typo, on p. 162. Then last week another friend (Andrew Dancer) read the book and also found just one typo. It was … Continue reading →
Grudgingly over the years, I’ve more or less made my peace with the use of “fun” as an adjective. “That was a fun movie.” You get the idea. Mathematicians often speak of “toy problems,” meaning problems cooked up to help … Continue reading →
Many of these notes, like my Applied Mathematician’s Apology, worry that mathematicians these days are interested in rigor and generality but not so much in solving problems. It was different in the days of Euler and Gauss. I am also … Continue reading →
I’ve recently read Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography and also Duffy’s The World as I Found It, about him and Wittgenstein. Russell was so focused, competent, determined, rational! But Wittgenstein, tormented and unbiddable, was cooler and maybe even more brilliant, and it … Continue reading →
Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968, and since then, the world population has gone up two-and-a-half times. Ehrlich has now died, and I’ve read the obituaries in Nature and the New York Times. Both say he was misguided. … Continue reading →
Every conversation I am in these days ends up on the topic of AI. Among many other worries, we fret about what it is doing to students’ ability to think. I was musing on this as I cycled along and … Continue reading →
Most of us probably have a few things we don’t expect ever to tell anyone, secrets we’ll take to the grave. For me, there are rather few of these, just one or two I can think of. For example, I … Continue reading →
Another note on the theme of my bewilderment with pure mathematicians. The eminent Fields Medallist Alain Connes has published a 3-page letter to the great Riemann for which he set himself the task: “What could I tell to Riemann that … Continue reading →