From Michael Atiyah’s essay Trends in Pure Mathematics. In any given field of mathematics there are always some very fine points which present great technical challenges to the specialist but not are usually of interest to the general mathematician. To make an analogy, if you want to buy some hand-made pottery you are usually not […]
From an interview with Philip Wolfe: [John von Neumann] always contended with Dantzig that the simplex method would take an absurdly long amount of time to solve linear programming problems. It appears to be, oh, so far as I know, the one place where Johnny went very badly wrong. Quoted in Undergraduate Convexity
From an interview with Dan North: People talk about being risk averse. “I’m very risk averse.” But actually when you scratch the surface they’re change averse. They’re terrified of change. And they wrap that up in “risk” which is a much more business-like word. … I’m risk averse, and the way I manage risk is […]
Here are the posts I wrote for the HLF blog last week. Kiosks in Karlsplatz Who was Nevalinna and what is his prize? Saxophone quartets and probability Michael Atiyah on exposition Fields Medal genealogy Turing Award genealogy Interview with Cédric Villani Prime windows A problem with heights Heidelberg Castle
Steve Awodey said of category theory Material at this level of abstraction is simply incomprehensible without the applications and examples that bring it to life. Michael Atiyah would say this is not unique to categories. When someone tells me a general theorem I say that I want an example that is both simple and significant. […]
I’m in Heidelberg this week at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum and having a great time. I’m writing for the conference blog and may not blog much here. We’ll see. Maybe later in the week I’ll have more time. The network connection in my hotel is down most of the time, so I’m writing this quickly […]
John Conway explained in an interview that he’s never applied for an academic job. I am rather proud of the fact that, in some sense, I never applied for an academic position in my life. What happened: I was walking down King’s Parade, the main street in Cambridge, after I received my Ph.D. The chairman […]
From David Mumford’s May 2013 interview in SIAM News: The applied mathematician has the difficult job of looking at a problem in context with no explicit mathematics and trying to see what kinds of mathematical ideas are under the surface that could clarify the situation. I think the most successful applied mathematicians are those who […]
From an interview with Neal Stephenson, giving some background for his Baroque Cycle: Leibniz [1646-1716] actually thought about symbolic logic and why it was powerful and how it could be put to use. He went from that to building a machine that could carry out logical operations on bits. He knew about binary arithmetic. I […]
I’ve just started reading Invisible in the Storm: The Role of Mathematics in Understanding Weather, ISBN 0691152721. The subtitle may be a little misleading. There is a fair amount of math in the book, but the ratio of history to math is pretty high. You might say the book is more about the role of mathematicians […]
