jrosenhouse | March 17, 2011Here's an interesting item from HuffPo. The following appeared as an essay question on the SAT:
Reality television programs, which feature real people engaged in real activities rather than professional actors performing scripted scenes, are increasingly popular. These shows depict ordinary people competing in everything from singing and dancing to losing weight, or just living their everyday lives. Most people believe that the reality these shows portray is authentic, but they are being misled. How authentic can these shows be when producers design challenges for the participants and then…
jrosenhouse | March 16, 2011My last post has provoked a few replies. Especially the part about the problem of evil.
In my review of the new book by Giberson and Collins I was critical of their treatment of the problem. Michael Ruse, always classy, opens his response thusly:
Given that they are both committed Christians, as well as totally convinced that modern science is essentially right and good, the book is intended to defend Christianity against the critics who argue that science and religion are incompatible. Expectedly, it has got all of the junior New Atheists jumping with joyous ire, and all over the blogs…
jrosenhouse | March 10, 2011Francis Collins and Karl Giberson have a new book out called The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions, published by InterVarsity Press. It is yet another defense of theistic evolution.
I'm always a bit conflicted when I write about this topic. On the one hand I do not think theistic evolution is a reasonable view, and I think the arguments made on its behalf are very weak. On the other hand, if I am stuck with religious faith being a major force in society then far better that it be the faith of theistic evolutionists than that of young-Earth creationists.…
jrosenhouse | March 7, 2011The BECB, that is. That's the big evolution/creation book, for those not up on the local slang. Finished the first draft last night. Very cool.
On the other hand, looks like I just lost my excuse for sporadic blogging...
jrosenhouse | February 28, 2011The big number theory course has moved on to modular arithmetic, which means we have been discussing Fermat's Little Theorem. Personally I've always thought that name is just adorable. As it happens, I already did a post on this topic. But since that post is close to a year old, and since I did not have my funky TeX renderer installed then, how about I repost it. Enjoy!
Fermat's Little Theorem is a classic result from elementary number theory, first stated by Fermat but first proved by Euler. It can be stated in a number of different ways, but here is the version most useful for what…
jrosenhouse | February 27, 2011I am arriving very late to the party on this one, but I would like to reply to one portion of this post from Jean Kazez. She writes:
Likewise, I don't see much point in discussing religion/science incompatibility in the public square. We can all agree on very plain and simple things--if science, then no creation in 6 days. If science, then no dinosaurs living at the same time as humans. Lots of limited incompatibilities like that are indisputable. But the more sweeping assertion that science rules out most of religion is complicated and technical (what is science? what is religion?…
jrosenhouse | February 25, 2011If you can forgive another chess post, the current issue of The New York Review of Books has a review, by Gary Kasparov, of a new biography of Bobby Fischer. The chessplayers among you won't find much you didn't already know, but the essay is well done nonetheless. Go have a look:
It would be impossible for me to write dispassionately about Bobby Fischer even if I were to try. I was born the year he achieved a perfect score at the US Championship in 1963, eleven wins with no losses or draws. He was only twenty at that point but it had been obvious for years that he was destined to become a…
jrosenhouse | February 23, 2011
The US Amateur Team East is one of the biggest and most exciting chess tournaments on the calendar. The comraderie of playing as part of a team, coupled with the complete absence of cash prizes, makes for a generally mellow experience. Having not played in a year I was a bit worried about some Caissic corrosion, but the first round helped me warm up.
This game was a reminder of how much fun chess can be when your opponent makes little attempt to cut across your plans. As usual we were paired down in the first round, meaning we were playing a team that was substantially lower…
jrosenhouse | February 18, 2011I will be spending the next few days in sunny Parsippany, NJ, participating in the annual chess extravaganza known as the World Amateur Team Chess Championship. I'm mostly retired from tournament play these days, too stressful, but I always poke up my head to push the wood at this one. I get to see a lot of old friends, and with 1500+ players it is an event not to be missed.
Monday Math will get the week off, in honor of the fact that my poor students have a test next week.
jrosenhouse | February 14, 2011Sociologist Phil Zuckerman of Pitzer College has been a hero of mine ever since he published (in 2008) an excellent book called Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment. He studied Sweden and Denmark, where atheists predominate, and showed rather effectively that when religious demagogues wail about the pernicious moral effects of a society losing its faith they are just making stuff up.
So you can imagine my disappointment at reading this asinine essay over at HuffPo. It's a poor representative of a tiresome genre: An atheist lectures his flock…
jrosenhouse | February 14, 2011The big number theory class has moved on to prime factorizations and the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. As it happens, though, I've already done a post on that subject.
Looking back at what I wrote then I see that I left out one important detail. I asserted without proof (though I did provide a link) that if a prime divides the product of two other numbers then it had to divide one of the two factors already. The proof of that result requires something that we estblished last week. So let's have a look.
Last week we mentioned that it is a consequence of the Euclidean algorithm that if…
jrosenhouse | February 9, 2011I'll bet someone out there can help me with a technical question. I need to embed a chess diagram into a LaTeX document. It's for the evolution/creation book (don't ask). I know there are a variety of packages available for doing that, but I'm having trouble finding anything very helpful on the web.
For example, I came across this document that describes a package for making diagrams. It looks perfect, attractive diagrams with clear instructions for how to code them. But I can't figure out where to go to download it. It looks like the source code is included in the document, but I don't…
jrosenhouse | February 9, 2011This is clearly the result of my earlier blog post.
Our customers have told us they want real page numbers that match the page numbers in print books so they can easily reference and cite passages, and read alongside others in a book club or class. Rather than add page numbers that don't correspond to print books, which is how page numbers have been added to e-books in the past, we're adding real page numbers that correspond directly to a book's print edition. We've already added real page numbers to tens of thousands of Kindle books, including the top 100 bestselling books in the Kindle…
jrosenhouse | February 7, 2011My number theory class has moved on from Pythagorean triples. Lately we've been talking about the Euclidean algorithm. Specifically, it's an algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor (gcd) of two numbers.
Of course, there are lots of ways finding the gcd. You could simply list all of the divisors of the first number, all of the divisors of the second number, and then compare the two lists. Let me suggest, though, that this method gets tedious in a hurry. Even for a computer it's hopelessly inefficient.
A somewhat better way involves finding the prime factorizations of the two…
jrosenhouse | February 7, 2011Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers (here and here respectively) have taken note of a session at the upcoming AAAS Annual Meeting entitled: Evangelicals, Science, and Policy: Toward a Constructive Engagement. They object to this intrusion of religion into a science meeting. In the comments to their posts, Nick Matzke has been gamely trying to defend the session.
These sorts of discussions always remind me of the paleontology conference I attended in 2009. I reported on it here and here. The conference featured two sessions of interest. I was there to participate in a panel discussion on…
jrosenhouse | February 7, 2011Elaine Howard Ecklund has a confusing post up at HuffPo. It is confusing because it is very unclear what exactly she wants.
There is strong evidence that religion is resurging among students on America's top university campuses. Yet, a large number of academic scientists firmly feel that they should not discuss religion in their classrooms. I have spent the last five years surveying nearly 1,700 natural and social scientists working at elite U.S. universities -- talking with 275 of them in-depth -- in an effort to understand their religious beliefs and practices, or lack thereof. As I…
jrosenhouse | February 7, 2011The BECB (the big evolution/creatio book) has been all-consuming lately. I've been struggling to meet my April 1 (no foolin!) deadline, which led me to spend virtually every waking moment last week either in the classroom, grading papers, or writing. My worry wasn't so much finishing the manuscript on time, since it is very nearly finished now, but finishing with enough time left over to send it out for feedback and comments. As it happens, though, late last week my editor contacted me and told me that for various reasons they wanted to push the deadline back to May 1 instead of April 1.…
jrosenhouse | January 31, 2011In chess news, Hikaru Nakamura took clear first place at the annual chess extravaganza in Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands, ahead of world champ Viswanathan Anand, former world champ Vladimir Kramnik, and current world number one Magnus Carlsen. Here's Gary Kasparov explaining the significance of this result for American chess:
Fischer never won a tournament ahead of the world champion. He was second in Santa Monica. Of course there were far fewer such events back then, and Fischer had several great tournament results like Stockholm 62, but it's interesting. Reuben Fine only equaled Keres on…
jrosenhouse | January 30, 2011I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, “Gosh, it sure is neat that we can generate all Pythagorean triples from one simple formula, but what happens if we try an exponent bigger than two? That is, can you find nontrivial integer solutions to the equation
\[
x^n+y^n=z^n
\]
when n is a positive integer bigger than two? We say “nontrivial” to avoid silly situations where, for example, all three variables are equal to zero.
This, of course, is the famous Fermat equation. Our question was finally answered, by Andrew Wiles in the mid-nineties, in the negative. Sadly, his proof is…
jrosenhouse | January 28, 2011From The San Francisco Chronicle:
A California university professor has been charged with peeing on a colleague's campus office door.
Prosecutors charged 43-year-old Tihomir Petrov, a math professor at California State University, Northridge, with two misdemeanor counts of urinating in a public place. Arraignment is scheduled Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court in San Fernando.
Investigators say a dispute between Petrov and another math professor was the motive.
The Los Angeles Times says Petrov was captured on videotape urinating on the door of another professor's office on the…