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Category: stories

2005 lists : mathematical novels

Published December 28, 2005 by lievenlb

Mathematical Fiction
is a nice site maintained by Alex Kasman and is an
attempt to collect information about all significant references to
mathematics in fiction. In september I ordered a pile of novels from
this list from Amazon and had an enjoyable read (mostly) since.
I’ve mentioned a couple of books already on this blog and at one
time had the intention of writing about each book I finished. But,
I’m not very good at refereeing/reviewing, so not much came out of
this… Still, the MathFiction list is an excellent way to
discover authors and books you probably wouldn’t encounter
otherwise. So far, I read about 15 novels from the list, focussing on
mystery (rather than SF or any other of the categories the list let you
choose from). Here is a list of the ten I liked most, in order (with
links to the relevant MathFiction page)

  1. In search of Klingsor, by Jorge Volpi
  2. Popco, by Scarlett Thomas
  3. Lord Byron’s novel ‘The Evening Land’, by John
    Crowley
  4. The Oxford Murders, by Guillermo Martinez
  5. Nymphomation, by Jeff Noon
  6. The fractal murders, by Mark Cohen
  7. Improbable, by Adam Fawer
  8. Calculating God, by Robert J. Sawyer
  9. The wild numbers, by Philibert Schogt
  10. Signal to noise, by Eric S. Nylund

If you
are interested in the lives of mathematicians and physicists living
around 1940, buy the first one. If not, try the second one and read more
about the author here, including her
neverending
interview…

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Jacobian conjecture remains open

Published December 24, 2005 by lievenlb

Lately some
papers were posted on the arXiv
claiming to solve the plane Jacobian conjecture. Fortunately, T.T. Moh took
the time to crack these attempts and posted the mistakes they made also
on the arXiv : Comment on a Paper by
Yucai Su On Jacobian Conjecture and Comment on a Paper by
Kuo, Parusinski and Paunescu On Jacobian Conjecture. Both papers are
only 2 pages long but are fun reading.

This note
was written on Oct 10, 2005 and was sent to the authors. At once
they replied to insist that they are correct, which was natural.
After a month we checked the website of Parusinski,
and found that a new sentence ”The proof contains some gaps in
section 7” by the authors without mentioning any objection by
us.

So, the plane Jacobian conjecture remains
open, at least for now..

As for Kuo and his
collaborators, we believe that they have a good taste of
mathematics, and wish that they will push the analytic method deeper
to solve the Jacobian Conjecture.

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teaching mathematics

Published December 21, 2005 by lievenlb

Tracking an email address from a subscribers’ list to the local news bulletin of a tiny village somewhere in the French mountains, I ended up at the Maths department of Wellington College.

There I found the following partial explanation as to why I find it increasingly difficult to convey mathematics to students (needless to say I got my math-education in the abstract seventies…)

“Teaching Maths in 1950:

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for £ 100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit?

Teaching Maths in 1960:

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for £ 100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or £80. What is his profit?

Teaching Maths in 1970:

A logger exchanges a set A of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100. Each element is worth one dollar. The set C the cost of production, contains 20 fewer elements than set M. What is the cardinality of the set P of profits?

Teaching Maths in 1980:

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for £ 100. His cost of production is £80 and his profit is £20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

Teaching Maths in 1990:

By cutting down beautiful forest trees, the logger makes £20. What do you think of this way of making a living? How did the forest birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down the
trees? (There are no wrong answers.)

Teaching Maths in 2000:

Employer X is at loggerheads with his work force. He gives in to union pressure and awards a pay increase of 5% above inflation for the next five years.

Employer Y is at loggerheads with his work force. He refuses to negotiate and insists that salaries be governed by productivity and market forces.

Is there a third way to tackle this problem? (Yes or No).”

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