A Mathematician Hosts $NOVA Wonders$

A Mathematician Reads

New York University mathematical physicist Alan Sokal published in the postmodern humanities journal Social Text a parody entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” [1]. His point in doing so was to test whether the field of “cultural studies of science” was seriously lacking in “intellectual standards”. His article is nonsense from start to...

The mathematician as a formalist

Web wonders

‘without wings, without legs, without eyes, wallowing well pleased in the midst of a mass of excrement,’ as the author Henry Mayhew described. Flies carried bacterial gastroenteritic diseases and were the cause of significant infant mortality in the late nineteenth century in the absence of good sanitation. The prospect of invasion by the damaging Colorado potato beetle provided impetus for the...

Jaw Development: Chinless Wonders

It has been suggested that the regionally restricted expression of Dlx genes acts to pattern the proximodistal axis of the pharyngeal arches during vertebrate development. Recently, clear evidence of this has emerged from Dlx-5; Dlx-6 double mutants, in which the lower jaw is transformed to an upper jaw.

Jonathan Borwein: Experimental Mathematician

Jonathan M. Borwein unexpectedly died on 2 August 2016, in London, Ontario, Canada, where he had been visiting on leave from home institution, the University of Newcastle, Australia. Since his death, the present author and Nelson H. F. Beebe of the University of Utah have been collecting Borwein’s many published papers, books, reports and talks, as well as a number of articles written by others...