Sadly, the big basketball game went the way everyone expected. Which is to say that we lost. Badly. Indiana 83 — JMU 62. Ouch! As it happens, my former academic home, Kansas State University, also lost. This one was a big upset, since, despite being the 4th seed, they lost to 13th seed La Salle.…

Check it out! Of course, now we have to play Indiana. Considering that it was a minor miracle that JMU made it to the tournament at all, while Indiana is among the favorites to win the whole thing, I’m not optimistic about our chances. History is against us, since no 16th seed has ever beaten…

The math department here at JMU has a Problem of the Week competition, and it just so happens that, this semester, I am running it. Every week I choose a problem for the consideration of all who choose to participate. (Well, I actually bribe my students to participate by offering them a bonus point for…

Philosopher Thomas Nagel recently published a book called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. The general consensus was that the book delivered considerably less than it promised. H. Allen Orr’s negative review from The New York Review of Books was pretty typical of the response, if somewhat…

I’ve recently had it called to my attention that Among the Creationists has been reviewed in Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith. That’s the journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, an organization of Christian scientists. They are generally sympathetic to evolution and mostly have little patience for ID and creationism. On the other hand,…

Slate has an interesting article, by Tara Haelle, discussing a math problem that recently received some attention on Facebook. The problem is to evaluate this expression: Obviously, the challenge here is not the arithmetic itself. It is to figure out the order in which to do the operations. I suspect most people would naturally do…

By now I’m sure you’ve heard that we have a new Pope. He is Jorge Mario Bergoglio, form Argentina, but from now on he will be known as Pope Francis. It appears he is a doctrinaire right-winger on issues related to homosexuality, abortion and conctraception, which is no surprise. Andrew Sullivan provides other reasons for…

Writing at The New Republic, Paul Berman has an interesting, if rather lengthy, article about Les Miserables, the book. I like his opening: The most famous and revealing scenes in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables get underway fairly late in the novel—on page 1,280 in the Pléiade edition—at the moment when the physically powerful Jean Valjean…

Writing in The Week, Damon Linker has a strange essay arguing that atheists who are honest about the consequences of their beliefs ought to be sad and mopey. The subtitle of his essay is, “That godlessness might be both true and terrible is something that the new atheists refuse to entertain.” This is a trope…

I have now returned form my travels in Baltimore and Washington DC. The big Hopkins talk went well, I think. Then I moseyed on down to Washington DC to hang out. This past week was spring break around here, though you would never have known it from the weather. While I was in DC, I…

I finally created a Twitter account, mostly so that I could find out who keeps tweeting about my posts. The little Twitter counter under the title consistently has some pleasingly non-zero number in it, so I thought I should find out what people are saying. Alas, whenever I click on the little number, it just…

Tomorrow I’ll be leaving for sunny Baltimore, Maryland. Tuesday evening I will be speaking at Johns Hopkins about the mathematics of Sudoku. To judge from the advertisement, it looks like it will be quite the party! Since its spring break around here, on Wednesday I will leave Baltimore to head over to Washington D.C. for…

I had two big deadlines this Friday for various projects, and I am happy to report that I made both of them. That means I finally have time to take a breath, and write the post you have all been waiting for. What happened at the U. S. Amateur Team East chess tournament!? That’s right!…

I spent the last weekend in scenic Parsippany, NJ, participating in the annual chess extravaganza known as the U. S. Amateur Team East. As big a chess fan as I am, I am mostly retired from tournament play. It’s too hard and stressful! For the first time in a long while, however, I managed to…

I am slowly working my way through the anthology Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative, edited by Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur. The book includes an excellent essay by mathematician Timothy Gowers titled, “Vividness in Mathematics and Narrative.” It makes a point that has often bothered me about mathematical discourse. Gowers opens with…