Lyssia

During a maths lesson in primary school in which we were flipping coins and doing other prob-related stuff, my coin landed on its edge. The girl I was working with and I just sat there and gawped before telling our teacher, who didn't believe us. It was seen by one other kid, and for the rest of the lesson and the lunch break afterwards the three of us tried to recreate it. Of course it all gets simplified, otherwise prob textbooks wouldn't talk about P(head) = P(tails) = 0.5. This is why I prefer something like algebra (in the main): simplifications make me nervous.

I've only read it a couple of times through, and not in any great detail, but it doesn't seem to make any glaring errors (not that I'm an expert of anything, however). I'm not sure if it's been submitted anywhere, so I wonder what kind of peer reviewing it would get.

I'm one of those people that can't just wing it; when I do I tend to just whitter away the entire day in front of the tv or something. I usually use a program like Korganiser to make to-do lists (not just relating to work - I'm as scatterbrained with everything else too) and organise what I'm doing each day.

All right, I'm looking for text recommendations now. Anyone (looks significantly at Matt Grime in particular) have any blisteringly good experiences with texts about abelian varieties? Thanks in advance!

A rather cool teapot/milk/sugar/mugs set and some Christian devotional stuff. I'm happy

Indeed, a very happy and blessed Christmas to everyone on sfn, and a prosperous 2006!

Hm, I'm not sure I could read a work from that far back (no matter how much of a classic it was) without my head exploding...

Undergraduates all over the UK (and probably some other countries too) do it every year. Whackloads of international students do it too. I've just done it for the upteenth time but I'm suffering from worse-than-average culture shock - and it's not like I live a huge distance away from the UK normally anyway. This afternoon I got on a bus and spoke to the driver in Dutch. When I walk along the street I automatically step to the right. I've lost any sense of "If someone's in your way, you'll apologise politely and step round them" - rather I've become a Brush-Your-Way-Past-And-Glare-If-They-Don't-Like-It rotter. I actually miss my bike (given my physique, that's laughable) and got lost in the University Library earlier because the signs to everything were in English. On the plus side though, my bed here is much more comfortable! Anyone else travelled "home" for Christmas? Any expats? Any similar weird stories?

Perhaps you could use the [math]y = mx +b[/math] to find a vector for each line and then use the scalar product?

Darn it, we need to be able to use HTML on here

I've just realised that I didn't post the image of my own result. Of course there's not much difference in any of the books as they're all yellow. But that's not the point. Here we go (hoping that the image attachment will work):

Oh, and you didn't even include the picture? For shame!

But the rationals are countable, right? A countable set isn't necessarily well-ordered? Hm, but the rationals are dense. Don't mind me, I forgot all my maths soon after I graduated.

Just for fun: http://www.math.mcgill.ca/~dsavitt/GTM.html I was the Warner book on manifolds and Lie groups. Which one are you?

Has anyone read God created the integers? I just found it on Amazon today and wondered if there's some feedback from here*. *it was a long shot, but there's no harm in trying.

I think that depends a lot on what kind of composer you're talking about. Webern championed a type of music called serialism which is literally composing by numbers (and the analysis of such pieces is great fun to boot!). Contrarily, many of the Romantic-era works seem to have absolutely no semblence of a structure to them at all. Bach's works could be said to be somewhere in the middle (although harmony and counterpoint are much more structured than most other types of music anyway) - almost composition by numbers, but still with the odd unpredicted surprise here and there. When it comes to modern popular music, the progressions involved are often so dull that you wonder if many artists just have a machine that churns stuff out when you turn a handle. As for the original question, I always had the idea that music was more closely related to maths than to anything involving the scientific method.

Right, this is the infinity book I'm reading at the moment: Everything and More. The Amazon page comes with some impressive-looking reviews but the only customer review is disappointing. To be honest, I can see both points of view. The front of the book carries a one-liner: "If Terry Pratchett wrote a book about mathematics, it would look uncannily like this." Which is true, in a way. Wallace's prose is easy to read, his language is about as far from stuffy as you can get (cf. footnote 29 on p. 114, which begins "Sh*t. All right. The strict truth is more complicated than that....") and sometimes it's just downright funny. It's a book that attempts to present the story of [math]\infty[/math] at least somewhat comprehensively and yet in a way that makes it accessible to those without university level maths. It sounds a tall order, and it is. Does Wallace manage it? I'm only about half way through at the moment but so far, I have to say I have my doubts. The main stumbling block for me is the most obvious: there isn't a contents page. I don't know how he (or his editor) justifies it - throughout the book is referred to as "a booklet" but it's just over an inch thick: much bigger than your average "booklet" and certainly big enough to make a ToC necessary, let alone a good idea. Other than that, the Amazon reviewer's concern about the proliferation of abbreviations is also something that bugs me. Well, it wouldn't bug me so much if all the abbreviations Wallace were actually given in the Foreword. A third and more minor annoyance is the way that everything carries a heavy US-bias. Continual references to Calc 1 don't mean much to a European who has no experience of the USA university system. If you can ignore (or at least live with) those two down points, then the book's quite good style-wise. I still have doubts about the way Wallace gets through the maths - can it really be said that someone with no higher maths experience will understand it as an "armchair book"? I'll reserve judgement for when I've finished reading it. In the meantime, I'll recommend it - for mathmos, at least - simply because it's got a very blue cover, and blue is my favourite colour.

I have a plethora of books about infinity. Well, all right, about four or something (which I still think is a bit excessive). Later on today I'll draw up A List and you can all gawk at it.

Hey, if it no longer interests you then I'm happy to take Proofs from the Book from you on an "extended loan"!

I don't think there's anything in it that you wouldn't find in any other "reacreational" book about pi, but I haven't read that many so I can't make a good comparison. Having said that, I do like the way it's all presented. It's probably not worth the hardback price so if you want to ask for it for Christmas or something, the paperback is better in terms of the money. Ooooh, I could start off on a rant about the price of maths books here, but I won't.

Ooh I have that book! It doesn't mollycoddle you at all, but given that it's a great intro into ANT, I think. Its predecessor ("Algebraic Number Theory"; it was first published well before Wiles' proof) was the starting point for my reading on the topic; it was a favourite of my supervisor but with good reason, I think. The measure theory book I had was Lebesgue Integration and Measure. I have emotional scars from that course so I probably can't be unbiased about the book. Anyone else read it?

Weren't you the person who recommended it to me in the first place? I like how thick it is - about half an inch. A nice, non-intimidating thickness for a maths text like this from the 1960s!

Bitter experience, I'm afraid!

Yup. Is this so strange?