With Both Hands

Sign in Subscribe

Math

Linkfest 2021-08-27: The Götterdämmerung of the Experts

Galaxy Magazine 1968: Pro and Con This ad from a 1968 issue of Galaxy magazine is a fascinating glimpse into the controversies of the past, and an opportunity for us to reflect on current events in Afghanistan. I didn’t find a lot of surprises in the authors who signed

The Long View: Is Mathematics Constitutional?

A recent popular [well, as popular as a massive book full of equations can be] exposition of mathematical Platonism is Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality. It even has practice problems in it with devoted communities of amateurs trading tips on how to solve them. Mathematical Platonism, or

The Long View: The Stopping Problem

This was the first thing I ever paid John for. He had a Paypal donate button on his site, and I paid him $5 for this short story. This is on my short list of favorite works by John Reilly. John had a fascination with Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem,

A golden age of engineering

In a Twitter exchange with John D. Cook, John mentioned to me that he "heard it said we live in a golden age of engineering and a dark age of science". That really got me thinking: do we live in a golden age of engineering and a dark

The STEM Crisis is a Myth

Robert Charette at IEEE Spectrum has a really good piece on the unreality of a shortage of workers with an education in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology [STEM]. Charette looks at all the different ways in which STEM jobs and STEM workers are counted. Different agencies count in different ways.

Simple Reaction Time Data

Simple Reaction Time Data

There has been a story trending recently in the news about the Victorians being cleverer than us. I've been following this story since Bruce Charlton broke it in February of 2012. I've never been that impressed, but I've thought about looking up the data

Real Life Jobs that use Algebra

That is a little more true than most people like to think. It is useful for me to have studied algebra, but I don't often need to directly apply the skills you learn in algebra class.