It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.
There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!
Do you know that as a PhD student at my university they let you check out books for 4 months?
Here I am, I become the hoarder of books that I was always meant to be
This s the obituary of Zura Karuhimbi, who may have been over 100 years old when she died and protected hundreds of people during the Rwandan genocide.
She did it by pretending to have magic powers.
Picture with me for a moment the sheer gall necessary to do this. An old woman, living alone, stuffs her tiny house with people running from militias. And when the militias show up at her door covers herself with irritating plants, so that when the militia try to manhandle her it ‘burns’ and proves her powers.
We’ve lost a legend.
Appearing like trenches dragged into the earth, sunken lanes, also called hollow-ways or holloways, are centuries-old thoroughfares worn down by the traffic of time. They’re one of the few examples of human-made infrastructure still serving its original purpose, although many who walk through holloways don’t realize they’re retracing ancient steps.
- Allison Meier in Atlas Abscura
In hopes of inspiring younger generations, NASA created this series of gorgeous retro travel posters that encourage you to imagine a future where common space travel is a legitimate possibility. Source
Unexpected great discoveries. Calculating the cosmos: How mathematics unveils the universe. By Ian Stewart.
Just a reminder that Vincent van Gogh did not eat yellow paint to make himself feel happy, he ate paint, and drank different chemicals because he was suicidal and this is why he was not allowed in his studio while having breakdowns. He also did not paint starry night and his other great works because he was depressed, he painted most of them while he was in recovery and demonstrated his hopefulness and love of the world through this. Most of his great works were painted from his room at a hospital. Van Gogh’s depression should not be glorified. His hope and effort toward a better life, as well as his recovery from depression should be glorified.
Littlewood polynomials are polynomials all of whose coefficients are either +1 or −1 (so even 0 is not allowed). If you take all Littlewood polynomials up to a certain degree, calculate all their (complex) roots, and plot those roots in the complex plane, then you get a beautiful fractal-like structure above.
The image is slightly misleading, because the “holes” on the unit circle tend to completely fill in if the degree goes up. Intuitively, the holes mean that complex numbers on the unit circle that are close to low-degree roots of unity are hard to approximate by low-degree Littlewood polynomials (unless they already are roots of unity).
In particular the structure at the edge of the ring is deeply interesting. Notice the familiarity with the dragon curve?
New gradblr here! PhD in maths and native catalan and spanish speaker.
Maybe I should post more things in catalan... The internet is too english predominant, it needs to change!
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Small and angry.PhD student. Mathematics. Slow person. Side blog, follow with @talrg.
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