When I finished my E.E. degree earlier this year, I told all my friends, “if you catch me looking at another university website, I have one word for you; chloroform.” I was so beat down by my last degree experience, I never wanted to register for another class, like ever.
Well, that shit didn’t last.
Previous to the E.E. degree, I was working on a math PhD via PhD By Publication. All the cool kids are doing it. But the layoff I barely dodged in 2023 told me I need to add an engineering degree to my resume if I want to stay in commercial space. So, I backed off the PhD, and buckled down on the E.E. degree.
I have been recovering from that unreal push to finish engineering for some months now. I got clear of all the crap I had going on and now my future roadmap is empty as far as the eye can see.
Then I went to bed last Sunday…
And woke up staring at a Post-It note I had written during the night. It contained the answer to the roadblock for my thesis that I have been fighting since 2022.
I kept it in my pocket all the next day.
It sat in there…
… whispering to me…
…the secrets of the universe.
By the end of the day, I wrote 21 pages of notes. I got further that day on my PhD then all the previous time I had accumulated… from a Post-It note written during what must have been some sort of Saganesque fever dream of Carl battling flat-earthers from beyond the grave.
Things have moved quickly since. I have reconstructed the basic mathematical concepts, rewritten the first 5 papers, and already have the the outlines for two adjacent papers done.
Welcome to the 232nd Carnival and my fourth time hosting the event.
To see past entries in the Carnival Of Mathematics and future scheduled hosts, please visit The Aperiodical.
I am honored to again host the Carnival of Mathematics! I learn so much from hosting; things I usually wouldn’t be exposed to are jam packed into every Carnival Of Mathematics post. Be sure to dig into the archive!
Here are the entries. Enjoy!
From Alice To The Mad Hatter: The Road To A PhD
By Storm Bear Williams
Everyone’s path to a PhD is different. Mine is more madcap than others.
This post is about the bottom center panel, “Game Theory final exam”.
I don’t know much about game theory and I haven’t seen any other discussion of this question. But I have a strategy I think is plausible and I’m somewhat pleased with.
(I assume that answers to the exam question must be real numbers — not ∞∞ — and that “average” here is short for ‘arithmetic mean’.)
First, I believe the other players and I must find a way to agree on what the average will be, or else we are all doomed. We can’t communicate, so we should choose a Schelling point and hope that everyone else chooses the same one. Fortunately, there is only one distinguished choice: zero. So I will try to make the average zero and I will hope that others are trying to do the same.
I’ve just uploaded to the arXiv my paper “Planar point sets with forbidden 4- point patterns and few distinct distance“. This (very) short paper was a byproduct of my recent explorations of the Erdös problem website in recent months, with a vague emerging plan to locate a suitable problem that might be suitable for some combination of a crowdsourced “Polymath” style project and/or a test case for emerging AI tools. The question below was one potential candidate; however, upon reviewing the literature on the problem, I noticed that the existing techniques only needed one additional tweak to fully resolve the problem. So I ended up writing this note instead to close off the problem.
Editor’s Note: Terance’s website if loaded with his work in mathematics.
Mathematics With Friends
by Ioanna Georgiou and illustrated by Asuka Young
“Mathematics with Friends” is a blog that takes a maths-related dialogue from the Friends TV series every month and explores the maths mentioned further. It comes with its own characters and amazing illustrations.
Books That Are About Maths, But Not About Teaching It
By Tom Briggs
In the spirit of getting straight to the point without providing my entire life history, please click below for a list of books that are about maths, but not about teaching it. Read beyond the link if you’d like a bit of context.
The list has been put together at The StoryGraph[2]: it can be browsed without creating an account and it can be searched, sorted and filtered, which I thought would be helpful as there are over 160 books.
A respectful story about the passing of a colleague. These things are never easy. Also an interesting correlation with Paul Halmos, the Hungarian-American mathematician. The full story is in the link below.
Math teacher Ben Orlin writes and draws the (aptly named) blog Math With Drawings and is the author of a new book, Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. To mark its publication, he devised this entertaining accompanying quiz. You can read the Ars interview with Orlin here.
Math, we like to say, is math. It often seems that mathematics is something beyond our control—something unyielding, universal, inhuman.
But is it really?
Yes and no. Math may be the language of the cosmos, but it’s also a human language, with its own quirky etymologies, classic literature, and hilarious regional accents. In fact, you could say that math has as many styles—as many idiolects—as it has speakers.
Viterbo’s conjecture was refuted by Pazit Haim-Kislev and Yaron Ostrover
by Gil Kalai
Claude Viterbo’s 2000 volume-capacity conjecture asserts that the Euclidean (even dimensional) ball maximizes (every) symplectic capacity among convex bodies of the same volume. In the recent paper A Counterexample to Viterbo’s Conjecture, Pazit Haim-Kislev and Yaron Ostrover disproved the conjecture.
In a dimly-lit tavern on the South Bank of the Thames, Philip Henslowe — builder and owner of the Rose Theatre — is celebrating the success of Shakespeare’s latest blockbuster, Henry VI Part I, among the cutthroats, actors and other lowlife of London. He spreads thirteen playing cards on a table in a circle. “Pick a card,” he grins. “Any card.”
And this article is complete with cryptic, vintage explanations!
Editor’s Note: Now I want to visit the Dulwich College Archive!
Book Review: The Best Writing on Mathematics 2021
by Ioanna Georgiou
Mircea Pitici (Editor) PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 2022, 320 PAGES PRICE (PAPERBACK) £20.00 ISBN 978-0-691-22570-8
This book contains articles written in 2020. The editor speaks of the difficulties accessing libraries and resources, something we are all a bit too familiar with. Here I will comment on each of the twenty-six articles selected as the ‘best’ and draw an overall conclusion at the end.
Editor’s Note: We have to start doing a better job in archiving and making available the collective of human knowledge to everyone. The defunding of libraries has to stop. The abusive research publication industry has to stop.
Storm Bear World 
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