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Which Springer Graduate Text in Mathematics would you be?
 | If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be Saunders Mac Lane's Categories for the Working Mathematician. I provide an array of general ideas useful in a wide variety of fields. Starting from foundations, I illuminate the concepts of category, functor, natural transformation, and duality. I then turn to adjoint functors, which provide a description of universal constructions, an analysis of the representation of functors by sets of morphisms, and a means of manipulating direct and inverse limits. Which Springer GTM would you be? The Springer GTM Test |
Hat tip to finiterank.
David Foster Wallace
kids get exposed very early to the idea that "you are the most important" and "what you are is the most important" and "your job in life is to gratify your own desires"...that's not happiness, that feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire, it seems to me to be a strange kind of slavery, nobody talks about it as such tough, they talk about freedom of choice, and you have the right to have things...
Flies and male psychology
Why is there a fly in the urinal?
Answer: To reduce spillage.
"So what do you think most men do? That's right, they aim at the fly when they urinate. They don't even think about it, and they don't need to read a user's manual; it's just an instinctive reaction. The interesting feature of these urinals is that they're deliberately designed to take advantage of this inherent human male tendency."
The fly in the urinal is a practice pioneered in Amsterdam's airport.
Talking about the science of urinals...
Logicomix
I picked up a copy of Logicomix (A. Doxiadis) last fall in Vancouver. The prospect of seeing Bertrand Russell turned into a comic character was enough of a motivation, not to mention the likes of Wittgenstein, Gödel, and Alan Turing.
Always since I heard about Russell's paradox I've had some sort of mathematician envy. Understanding this very simple contradiction changed the way I looked at maths, and got me quite obsessed for a little while. Well, the story of the barber who only shaves people who don't shave themselves is right there in the comic, and it goes on to tell the tale of how the foundations of mathematics were shaken by a group of freakish mathematicians. It is exactly the characters, more than the "science" itself what the focus of the book is... rightly so I believe, although I can imagine that those who are actually trained in maths might finish the book with some sort of bittersweet taste to it, wanting to see more science.
The book is coauthored by a computer scientist, and it is quite a thrill to see how the very core of maths is historically and scientifically connected to the machines that are nowadays (virtually) in everyone's life.
PD: If you like this one, read Uncle Petro and Goldbach's conjecture, from the same author, it s at the very least just as good, although that's a rather void comparison, since the latter is a novel, and not a comic book, and I don't particularly like comics.
Always since I heard about Russell's paradox I've had some sort of mathematician envy. Understanding this very simple contradiction changed the way I looked at maths, and got me quite obsessed for a little while. Well, the story of the barber who only shaves people who don't shave themselves is right there in the comic, and it goes on to tell the tale of how the foundations of mathematics were shaken by a group of freakish mathematicians. It is exactly the characters, more than the "science" itself what the focus of the book is... rightly so I believe, although I can imagine that those who are actually trained in maths might finish the book with some sort of bittersweet taste to it, wanting to see more science.
The book is coauthored by a computer scientist, and it is quite a thrill to see how the very core of maths is historically and scientifically connected to the machines that are nowadays (virtually) in everyone's life.
PD: If you like this one, read Uncle Petro and Goldbach's conjecture, from the same author, it s at the very least just as good, although that's a rather void comparison, since the latter is a novel, and not a comic book, and I don't particularly like comics.
Economics degree
I get the feeling here "philosophy degree" could be perfectly swapped for "economics degree".
Just to give an example.
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