Now on ScienceBlogs: And so, driven on ceaselessly toward new shores
Finding the fun in good math; Shredding bad math and squashing the crackpots who espouse it.
Mark Chu-Carroll (aka MarkCC) is a PhD Computer Scientist, who works for Google as a Software Engineer. My professional interests center on programming languages and tools, and how to improve the languages and tools that are used for building complex software systems.
Category: Chaos
So I'm trying to ease back into the chaos theory posts. I thought that one good way of doing that was to take a look at one of the class chaos examples, which demonstrates just how simple a chaotic...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 10:20 AM • 20 Comments •
Category: goodmath
So, why math? The short version of the answer is remarkably simple: math provides a tool where you can, without ambiguity, prove that something is true or false. I'll get back to that - but first, I'm going to...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 3:11 PM • 98 Comments •
Category: goodmath
Today the 2008 Nobel Prize winners were announced for physics. It was given to three physicists who described something called symmetry breaking. Since most people don't know what symmetry breaking is, but people remember me writing about group theory...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 8:36 PM • 15 Comments •
Category: goodmath
Every year at ScienceBlogs, we do a charity drive for DonorsChoose.org. If you haven't heard of them, DonorsChoose is a charity that takes proposals from schoolteachers, and lets people pick specific proposals to donate money to. We run our...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 8:22 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: goodmath
I've been getting a ton of questions about an article from the Independent about a guy named Bertie Smalls. Bertie was a british thief who died quite recently, who was famous for testifying against his organized crime employers back...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 9:56 AM • 24 Comments •
Category: goodmath
To be honest, I haven't been following the Carnival of Math much since it's inception; my new job keeps me busy enough that I barely have time to keep the blog going, and so I haven't really looked much...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 11:43 AM • 12 Comments •
Category: goodmath
I've been seeing articles popping up all over the place about a recent PLOS article called Order in Spontaneous Behavior. The majority of the articles seem to have been following the lead of the Discovery Institute, which claims that...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 1:24 PM • 49 Comments •
Category: goodmath
I came across this while looking through the referrals to GM/BM. This is an incredibly cool video of a strange phenomenon called the Kaye effect. It includes high speed video of the effect, and a demonstration of their mathematical...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 8:55 PM • 16 Comments •
Category: goodmath
I'm currently reading "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. I'll be posting a review of it after I finish it. A "strange loop" is Hofstadter's term for a Gödel-esque self-referential cycle. A strange loop doesn't have to...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 12:34 PM • 42 Comments •
Category: goodmath
As an alert reader pointed out, a major mathematical prize was awarded recently. Since 2002, the government of Norway has been awarding a prize modeled on the Nobel, but in mathematics. The prize was originally suggested by Sophus Lie,...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 8:05 PM • 14 Comments •
