herid @herid@qoto.org

Very interesting interview with an applied topologist. Just as John Cook (the interviewer) I had no idea applied topology was a thing. Would not have thought homology can help with planning cellular network coverage. Apparently it does. #mathematics

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/09/13/applied-topology-and-dante-an-interview-with-robert-ghrist/

Finished listening to 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.

It’s quite good but I liked it slightly less than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (the only other book of Murakami I’ve read). Too much filler IMO.

Also a minor personal quibble. Description of #mathematics and mathematicians is really cliched. It reminds of a comment by an acquaintance that being a mathematician my job must be boring because how interesting can it be to add numbers all day.

#bookstadon #book #audiobook #books

Yesterday I had to explain to a non-math undergraduate student what Riemannian geometry is. Surprisingly difficult. I tried to explain curvature in pictures and mentioned as an example that you can't make an accurate map of any region of Earth on a flat sheet of paper because the former is not flat but the latter is. I wonder what examples people use in similar situations. #mathematics #math

PSA:

Terry Tao is on Mastodon!
@tao

He is a Fields medalist and one of the best (maybe the best) mathematicians in the world. Highly recommend him as a follow.

#mathematics

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.
Alan Turing

#quoteoftheday #mathematics

Interesting quote but I would disagree somewhat. Science is both a differential equation and a boundary condition. Religion is trying add a new boundary condition which make the differential equation unsolvable.

One of my favorite #mathematics papers is a paper by Milnor "On manifolds homeomorphic to the 7-sphere" from 1956.
https://www.scribd.com/document/75338163/John-Milnor-On-Manifolds-Homeomorphic-to-the-7-Sphere
It's only 7 pages long (8 with bibliography). Milnor showed that there exists a smooth 7-manifold homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to the 7-sphere. The proof is absolutely beautiful and has influenced much of the development of high dimensional topology to this day.

"Anyone who cannot cope with #mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house."
Robert A. Heinlein