Former guest on Strongly Connected Components Steven Strogatz has been having a rather good year. Not only did he appear on our podcast, he told part of the story from his new book The Calculus of Friendship, just finished it myself a couple of weeks ago it is a great read you should go and buy it, on the Numbers Episode of Radio Lab, and he now also blogs for the New York Times. Strogatz has become a part of Opinionator group of blogs over at the New York Times website where he is writing a series of posts about mathematics in wonderfully descriptive plain language, he started with a post about numbers and is now on roots. From that first post:

Children learn from this that numbers are wonderful shortcuts. Instead of saying the word “fish” exactly as many times as there are penguins, Humphrey could use the more powerful concept of “six.”

As adults, however, we might notice a potential downside to numbers. Sure, they are great time savers, but at a serious cost in abstraction. Six is more ethereal than six fish, precisely because it’s more general. It applies to six of anything: six plates, six penguins, six utterances of the word “fish.” It’s the ineffable thing they all have in common.

No matter who you are Strogatz’s exposition is plenty good enough to hold your attention, and the content is parse-able by anyone. If you are a mathematician go and read this to help reground yourself in the most basic contents, then go tell all the non-mathematicians you know to go read this so they know what the hell you have been talking about for all these years. (Strogatz Opionionator)

There are some people out there who are just fantastic at writing about mathematics. Mark Chu-Caroll of Good Math Bad Math is one of those people. While I imagine most people who will read this already regularly read his blog, if you do not, or if you just happened to miss this post, you have to read Chu-Caroll’s post about “What is Math“:

To me, math is the study of how to create, manipulate, and understand abstract structures. I’ll pick that apart a bit more to make it more comprehensible, but to me, abstract structures are the heart of it. Math can work with numbers: the various different sets of numbers are examples of one of the kinds of abstract structures that we can work with. But math is so much more than just numbers. It’s numbers, and sets, and categories, and topologies, and graphs, and much, much more.

What math does is give us a set of tools for describing virtually anything with structure to it. It does it through a process of abstraction. Abstraction is a way of taking something complicated, focusing in on one or two aspects of it, and eliminating everything else, so that we can really understand what those one or two things really mean.

…

Math is unavoidable. It’s a deeply fundamental thing. Without math, there would be no science, no music, no art. Math is part of all of those things. If it’s got structure, then there’s an aspect of it that’s mathematical.(Read the rest)

As some of the undergraduate guests on Combinations and Permutations, such as Christopher Bates and Cody Palmer, prepare to take the Putnam I thought I would post a couple of links about it today. The Putnam, or more formally the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, is, according to the Wikipedia:

An annual mathematics competition for undergraduate college students of the United States and Canada, awarding scholarships and cash prizes ranging from $250 to $2,500 for the top students and $5,000 to $25,000 for the top schools. The competition was founded in 1927 by Elizabeth Lowell Putnam in memory of her husband William Lowell Putnam, who, while alive was an advocate of intercollegiate intellectual competition. The exam has been offered annually since 1938 and is administered by the Mathematical Association of America.

I recently interviewed Bruce Reznick from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on Strongly Connected Components. He used to write problems for the Putnam and then decided to write a fascinating article about his experiences. From the article:

The phrase “Putnam problem” has a achieved a certain cachet among those mathematicians of the problem-solving temperament and is applied to suitable attractive problems which never appeared on the exam. One motivation for my joining the Problems Subcommittee was the aesthetic challenge of presenting the mathematical community a worthy  set of problems. In fact, the opportunity to maintain this “brand name of quality” was more enticing to me than the mere continuation of an undergraduate competion. Of course, the primary audience for the Putnam must always be students, not one’s colleagues.

At the same time, the Putnam cause a few negative effect, mainly because of its difficulty. Math contests are supposed to be hard, and the Putnam is the hardest one of all. In 1972, I scored less than 50% and finished seventh. In most years, the median Putnam paper has fewer than two largely correct solutions. For this reason, the first problem in each session is designed to require an “insightlet”, though not a trivial one. We on the committee tried to keep in mind that median Putnam contestants, willing to devote one of the last Saturdays before final exams to a math test, are likely to receive an advanced degree in the sciences. It is counterproductive on many levels to leave them feeling like idiots.

Finally the Accidental Mathematician is on her first year of writing problems for the Putnam and has the following to say about the problem difficulty on the Putnam:

Well, you could call it a steep learning curve. Putnam problems are expected to be hard in a particular way: they should require ingenuity and insight, but not the knowledge of any advanced material beyond the first or occasionally second year of undergraduate studies, and there should be a short solution so that, in principle, an infinitely clever person could solve all 12 problems in the allotted 6 hours. (In reality, that doesn’t happen very often, and I’ve heard that it generates considerable attention when someone comes too close.) The problems are divided into two groups of six – A1-A6 for the morning session and B1-B6 for the afternoon session – and there is a gradation of the level of difficulty within each group. A1 is often the hardest to come up with – it should be the easiest of the bunch, but should still require some clever insight and have a certain kind of appeal. The difficulty (for the competitor, not for us) then increases with each group, with A6 and B6 the hardest problems on the exam. There are also various subtle differences between the A-problems and B-problems; this is something that I would not have been aware of if another committee member hadn’t pointed it out to me. For example, a B1 could involve some basic college-level material (e.g. derivatives or matrices), but this would not be acceptable in an A1, which should be completely elementary.

So to all of you out there about to write the Putnam, best of luck knock it out of the park.

Welcome to all that found us through Sum Idiot’s Carnival of Mathematics #60. If you have never been to this blog before I feel that I should give a bit of an introduction to what ACME Science is as a website. We are primarily the home to the two podcasts Combinations and Permutations and Strongly Connected Components. Combinations and Permutations is the original podcast hosted by me, Samuel Hansen, and is a light hearted, once in a while even funny, take on mathematics where we choose a topic, like the Calculus Cage Match or Combinations and Permutations themselves, and riff on the topic and any tangential conversations that it causes to arise. Strongly Connected Components is a much more serious show where I interview mathematicians such as Joshua Cooper or President of the AMS George Andrews. I also post on various things in science and mathematics that I find interesting. I am happy that you are here viewing the site and I hope you find something that interests you here. For updates about when the new episodes of the podcasts are up or new blog posts you can follow me @acmescience on twitter.

There is a very fun conversation going on over at twitter about people’s favorite theorems. Here are some that showed up so far:

@andy_swallow: #favoritetheorem Of course Euclid’s proof of infinitude of primes is a beautiful thing.

@sumidiot: i like the little theorems, like… khinchin’s constant exists#favoritetheorem

@divbyzero: #favoritetheorem? Gotta be Euler’s polyhedron formula: V-E+F=2

@bakhvalov: My vote goes to Banach-Tarski Theorem can it get more counterintuitive? “…doubling the ball can be accomplished with five pieces; fewer than five pieces will not suffice.” #favoritetheorem

@RobertTalbert: Fermat’s Little Theorem: a^p = 1 mod p (p prime).#favoritetheorem

One of the first things one notices after joining a math department as a graduate student is just how splintered, or to use a math term, non-continuous the academic atmosphere is. The analysis people don’t talk to the algebraists, both of whom turn there noses at at number theorists who won’t deign to talk to a discrete mathematician and everyone talks behind the back of the statisticians. As someone who throughout there entire academic career was a talented generalist, I score higher on English standardized tests than mathematics ones, instead of a specialist I found myself in the unenviable position of having to choose what area of mathematics I wanted to specialize in instead of being able to let my academic whimsy take me where it would. During my education thus far in graduate school I have found that this partitioning of mathematics has never been a help and is often an hindrance both to furthering and deepening my mathematical knowledge and to my enjoyment of mathematics. Recently there have been a couple of really good posts written on this subject that I want to share with all of you.

The first is by Doron Zeilberger who talks about the shocking state of contemporary mathematics through the lens of a recent conference he attended. The article starts

I just came back from attending the 1052nd AMS (sectional) meeting at Penn State, last weekend, and realized that the Kingdom of Mathematics is dead. Instead we have a disjoint union of narrow specialties, and people who know everything about nothing, and nothing about anything (except their very narrow acre). Not only do they know nothing besides their narrow expertise, they don’t care!

The “meeting” was not really a meeting. It was many mini-meetings! 22 of them, running in parallel and in complete oblivion of each other. All that they shared was the coffee, tea, and donuts. That’s a little reassuring that an algebraic combinatorialist has at least one thing in common with an algebraic geometer, a q-serieser, and a Heat-kernel group theorist: they all drink coffee (or tea), and eat donuts! But that’s about it.(read the rest)

The second is by Ben Tilly who left his mathematics PhD program before finishing because he just did not want a career in a single clique:

Why do mathematicians put up with this? I’ll need to describe a mathematical culture a little first. These days mathematicians are divided into little cliques of perhaps a dozen people who work on the same stuff. All of the papers you write get peer reviewed by your clique. You then make a point of reading what your clique produces and writing papers that cite theirs. Nobody outside the clique is likely to pay much attention to, or be able to easily understand, work done within the clique. Over time people do move between cliques, but this social structure is ubiquitous. Anyone who can’t accept it doesn’t remain in mathematics.

I really do love mathematics and really like a lot of the people who are in the discipline I just hope that the culture changes or I, as Ben Tilly did before me, am going to have to leave the discipline and head towards more interdisciplinary pastures where generalists are embraced instead of looked down upon.

When one talks to non-math people about mathematics classes one of the most common complaints is about proofs. Well I was researching a bit for my interview with Josua Cooper from University of South Carolina, look for the episode later this week, and I stumbled on this paper he wrote on why proofs are necessary in math classes that I think really does get right to heart of the usefulness that proofs have. From the paper:

That’s right. You are going to have to endure proofs. Like many of my students, perhaps you are asking yourself (or me), why do I have to learn proofs? Aren’t they just some esoteric, jargon-filled, technical writing that only a professional mathematician would care about?

Well, no. And I’d like to offer a short justification of this claim. My argument is three-fold: (1) proofs are all around you, (2) it’s quite possible to get better at them by practice and by benefiting from the accumulated knowledge of two thousand years of mathematicians, and (3) this will really help you in “real life,” whether you go into mathematics, carpentry, or child-rearing. (Rest of the Paper)

Really go and read the rest of the paper which is fantastic and get properly excited and worked up to hear my interview with Joshua Cooper which should hit the feed on Wednesday.