A Portrait of Paul Erdös

Random Lecture- Dynamic Programming

Cantor, Boltzmann, Gödel and Turing

In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

India's answer to MIT OpenCourseWare?

Excellent set of videos from Indian IITs- National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning.

Basics in Mathematics, Science and Engineering

Management Information System

Leadership

Management Science I

Mathematics 01 (Rating 10 out of 10)

Link to YouTube channel

Maths Podcast of the Day

In his book The Mathematician's Apology (1941), the Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy expressed his reverence for pure maths, and celebrated its uselessness in the real world. Yet one of the branches of pure mathematics in which Hardy excelled was number theory, and it was this field which played a major role in the work of his younger colleague, Alan Turing, as he worked first to crack Nazi codes at Bletchley Park and then on one of the first computers.

Melvyn Bragg and guests explore the many surprising and completely unintended uses to which mathematical discoveries have been put.

Download the podcast

Link of the Day

UCTV on Nobel Laureates

Science Podcast of the Day

THE DISCOVERY OF RADIATION;

Today the word ‘radiation’ conjures up pictures of destruction. But in physics, it simply describes the emission, transmission and absorption of energy. And the discovery of how radiation works has allowed us to identify new chemical elements, treat cancer and work out what the stars are made of.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, physicists from Thomas Young through Michael Faraday to Henri Becquerel made discovery after discovery, gradually piecing together a radically new picture of reality. They explored the light beyond the visible spectrum, connected electricity and magnetism - and eventually showed that heat, light, radio and mysterious new phenomena like 'X-rays' were all forms of 'electromagnetic wave'.

In the early twentieth century, with the discovery of radioactivity, scientists like Max Planck and Ernest Rutherford completed the picture of the 'electromagnetic spectrum'. This was a cumulative achievement that transformed our vision of the physical world – and what we could do in it.

Further Reading;

Al-Khalili, Jim, Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed (Phoenix, 2004)

Al-Khalili, Jim, and Bizony, Piers, Atom (Icon, 2008)

James, Frank (ed.), The Correspondence of Michael Faraday (Institute of Engineering and Technology, 2009)

Close, Frank, Antimatter (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Marion, Jerry B. and Heald, Mark A., Classical Electromagnetic Radiation (Thomson Learning; 3rd Revised edition 1994)

Maxwell, James Clerk, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism Vol 1 & 2 (Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences, 1998)

Lützen, Jesper, Mechanistic Images in Geometric Form: Heinrich Hertz's 'Principles of Mechanics' (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Random Course

Aircraft Systems Engineering

Uranium

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Tom Zoellner
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Uranium by Tom Zoellner;

Uranium’s history is a geological ugly duckling tale. Aside from occasional use as a dye, the ore was most often seen as trash — its German name, Pechblende, meant “bad-luck rock,” Zoellner says — and silver miners who found the greasy gray uranium dirt just left it in piles nearby. It was only with Marie and Pierre Curie’s discovery of radium in uranium ore that people started to take notice — the Curies, after all, touted their find as a cure for cancer. Experiments on radium led in 1932 to the discovery of the neutron, which the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard grasped might be able to set off catastrophically powerful chain reactions. The rest, more or less, is history.

Which is a bit of a problem for Zoellner. The genre of pop microhistory into which his book fits — “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World,” and “Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World” — is predicated on the idea that these are not things people normally understand to be world-changing. Nuclear weapons, however, are not in this category. As a result, large portions of the story Zoellner tells have been explored in more depth in other popular accounts.

Perhaps to address this, Zoellner intersperses the history with descriptions of his own globe-trotting, from the Congo to Mongolia, from the American West to Eastern Europe to Australia. He pokes around in old mines and tours a uranium refining plant. He calls at the offices of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, and the World Nuclear Association, in London. He interviews the Yemeni minister of electricity, is almost kidnapped on the way to a mine in Niger and knocks back Chechen grappa with border guards responsible for keeping black-market uranium from being smuggled from Russia into Georgia.

Assorted Intellectual Tresspassing

The Civil Heretic

Open Culture

We recommend the blog Simoleon Sense

Father of the Analysis of Algorithms

In the fall of 1999, Donald was invited to give six public lectures at MIT on the general subject of relations between faith and science, during which he touched upon such topics as the interaction of randomization and religion, language translation, art and aesthetics, and the 3:16 project. During his talk at Google, Donald will similarly be focusing on the interactions between faith and science.

Knuth has been called the father of the Analysis of Algorithms and he explains his decision to embark in this particular field. He says, "If I consider the entire class of all interesting algorithms, then it's bound to be full of problems just as interesting as queuing and hashing...So that's why, right at that point, I said 'Hmm, that wouldn't be bad...to spend a lifetime on it, because you have a huge number of problems, not only do they have beautiful mathematical structures that tie together, you know, hang together in nice patterns, but also there are customers out there; so that when you solve the problem, the people say, 'Hey, thanks for solving the problem, Don.' So it's a great field to embark in."

Some books recommended by Knuth;

* Life A Users Manual by Georges Perec (perhaps the greatest 20th century novel)
* Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers (captures Oxford high-table small-talk wonderfully)
* An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears (also Oxford but in the 1660s)
* Death of a Salesperson by Robert Barnard (who is at his best in short stories like these)
* The Haj by Leon Uris (great to read on a trip to Israel)
* Marjorie Morningstar by Herman Wouk (in-depth characters plus a whole philosophy)
* On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee (applied biochemistry in the kitchen)
* Food by Waverley Root (his magnum opus, a wonderful history of everything delicious)
* The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth (the Great California Novel, entirely in 14-line sonnets)
* The Age of Faith by Will Durant (volume 4 of his series, covers the years 325--1300)
* Efronia by Stina Katchadourian (diaries and letters of a remarkable Armenian woman)
* The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel (biographies of Ramanujan and Hardy)
* Hackers by Steven Levy (incredibly well written tale of our times)
* The Abominable Man by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (one of their brilliantly Swedish detective novels)

The Two Cultures asscociated with Wine and Beer

Grape vs. Grain- A Historical, Technological, and Social Comparison of Wine and Beer

Why is wine considered more sophisticated even though the production of beer is much more technologically complex? Why is wine touted for its health benefits when beer has more nutritive value? Why does wine conjure up images of staid dinner parties while beer denotes screaming young partiers? Charles Bamforth explores several paradoxes involving these beverages, paying special attention to the culture surrounding each. He argues that beer can be just as grown-up and worldly as wine and be part of a healthy, mature lifestyle. Both beer and wine have histories spanning thousands of years. This is the first book to compare them from the perspectives of history, technology, nature of the market for each, quality attributes, types and styles, and the effect that they have on human health and nutrition.

The arrival of Homo Evolutis

The Super-Organism

The Super-Organism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies;

Ants and other social insects are good at what they do, and they get better by means of cooperative labor. Their behavior fulfills principles of ergonomic efficiency embodied in the Barlow-Proschan theorems. When individual competence is low, the first theorem says, the reliability of a system of individuals acting together is lower than the summed competence of the individuals acting singly; but when individual competence is high, above a certain threshold level, the reliability of the system based on cooperation is greater. According to the second theorem, one redundant system, whose parts that can be switched back and forth (as in colony members), is more reliable than two identical systems with no such backup parts.

How can you know when someone is bluffing?

Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World
Alex (Sandy) Pentland

How can you know when someone is bluffing? Paying attention? Genuinely interested? The answer, writes Sandy Pentland in Honest Signals, is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These unconscious social signals are not just a back channel or a complement to our conscious language; they form a separate communication network. Biologically based "honest signaling," evolved from ancient primate signaling mechanisms, offers an unmatched window into our intentions, goals, and values. If we understand this ancient channel of communication, Pentland claims, we can accurately predict the outcomes of situations ranging from job interviews to first dates.

Pentland, an MIT professor, has used a specially designed digital sensor worn like an ID badge—a "sociometer"—to monitor and analyze the back-and-forth patterns of signaling among groups of people. He and his researchers found that this second channel of communication, revolving not around words but around social relations, profoundly influences major decisions in our lives—even though we are largely unaware of it. Pentland presents the scientific background necessary for understanding this form of communication, applies it to examples of group behavior in real organizations, and shows how by "reading" our social networks we can become more successful at pitching an idea, getting a job, or closing a deal. Using this "network intelligence" theory of social signaling, Pentland describes how we can harness the intelligence of our social network to become better managers, workers, and communicators.

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