Maria Mannone interviewed John Baez for her blog, Math is in the air. His words will really inspire a lot of students.
John Baez:
It seems only certain people are drawn to mathematics, and that’s fine: there are many wonderful things in life and there’s no need for everyone explore all of them. Mathematics seems to attract people who enjoy patterns, who enjoy precision, and who don’t want to remember lists of arbitrary facts, like the names of all 206 bones in the human body. In math everything has a reason and you can understand it, so you don’t really need to remember much. At first it may seem like there’s a lot to remember - for examples, lists of trig identities. But as you go deeper into math, and understand more, everything becomes simpler. These days I don’t bother to remember more than a couple of trigonometric identities; if I ever need them I can figure them out.
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But the really surprising thing is that as you go deeper and deeper into mathematics, it keeps revealing more beauty, and more mysteries. You enter new worlds full of profound questions that are quite hard to explain to nonmathematicians. As the Fields medalist Maryam Mirzakhani said, “The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.”
On December 25th, let us celebrate the forgotten birthday of an individual, whose entire purpose in life was solely devoted towards the pursuit of truth. An individual who would not stop wherever that pursuit led him to, be it lores of alchemical treatises or complex mathematical works.
Knowing the difference of knowing the name of something and knowing something, makes you more interested on what that something really is. Keeping this mindset, I think, will make people inclined to thinking critically.
How to convert climate-changing carbon dioxide into plastics and other products — Rutgers scientists develop green chemistry based on a natural process.
The decision, made at the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Versailles, France, which is organised by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), means that all SI units will now be defined in terms of constants that describe the natural world. This will assure the future stability of the SI and open the opportunity for the use of new technologies, including quantum technologies, to implement the definitions.
The changes, which will come into force on 20 May 2019, will bring an end to the use of physical objects to define measurement units.
sr.ht, the hacker’s forge, now open for public alpha — This is good.
Blizzard is releasing a remaster of Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos, the company announced during the opening ceremony for this year’s BlizzCon. The game is called Warcraft 3: Reforged, as revealed with both cinematic and gameplay trailers shown during the event.
The rumored remaster of Warcarft 3 last year was true. I’m excited!
What we haven’t learned, because it hasn’t been directly measured in experiments, is whether antimatter falls down at the same rate as ordinary matter or if it might behave differently. Two new experiments at CERN, ALPHA-g and GBAR, have now started their journey towards answering this question
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope returned to normal operations late Friday, Oct. 26, and completed its first science observations on Saturday, Oct. 27 at 2:10 AM EDT.
… Originally required to last 15 years, Hubble has now been at the forefront of scientific discovery for more than 28 years.
Talking Hawking – his new book and ‘last’ scientific paper
Patrick Honner on imaginary and complex numbers, Quanta Magazine:
… And they are the first step into a world of strange number systems, some of which are being proposed as models of the mysterious relationships underlying our physical world.