Monday, January 10, 2011

Math Specialization et. al...

Cliff Pickover recently tweeted a link to this interesting older post (2009) by Doron Zeilberger; timely, with the current joint math meetings just ended in New Orleans (it deals with the degree to which math is now composed of highly-specialized areas, and what this means for large conferences):

http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion104.html

(Zeilberger urges more "generalists" in math "who can see the big picture;" of course, extreme specialization is a problem faced today by most of the sciences)

And a few months after the above posting, Zeilberger wrote a followup with suggestions for improving professional math meetings:

http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion106.html

(...I just wish he'd tell us how he REALLY feels. ;-))


Meanwhile, "polygeek" has been playing around with prime numbers and asks for comments to his recent  findings/patterns here:

http://polygeek.com/3327_flex_prime-patterns-2



Lastly, on a side-note, since most math-folks are also interested in physics, I'll pass along this person's top 10 list of popular physics books from 2010:

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/44623


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