GIRLS!

I've been loving GoldiBlox ever since I saw its kickstarter...

But now that I've seen their new ad, I love them EVEN MORE!!!

Here's hoping the next ad will use "whatcha want"...

I'm a math person, and not for the reason you think

Thanks to Nabil for an interesting read this morning. Do you think you're just bad at math? Maybe if you read this you will change your mind.

I was "good at math" in high school, and then when I got to my sophomore year of college I suddenly felt like my ability was all an illusion. Vector calculus, differential equations, complex exponentials... junior year saw quantum physics and complex analysis and I struggled, a lot. I definitely avoided more strictly math classes because of that, until I started graduate school at UCLA and realized the math is what I liked best! After working hard at it for a few years, I was back on track. At age 29 I took analysis again-- and this time I didn't stop until I was part way through advanced graduate classes, and I only stopped because I needed to focus on my dissertation.

If I hadn't happened upon mathematics again, where would I be today? It's so obvious to me now that when I was 20 years old, I simply didn't have the preparation of the other students (most in the complex analysis class were math majors, for example).

So if you once liked math but at some point felt like you just didn't have the ability of others, I hope you read this and think again. We will probably not become Terrance Taos or Elon Lindenstrausses (two recent fields medalists, the second the son of the mathematician for whom the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma is named). But with a little work we can be a lot more comfortable with math than we used to be.

support our cause

This one from rombo made me lol: http://imgur.com/proArHD. This is especially relevant to my DSP students who are using classifiers in their class project!

birds!

This article about crowd sourcing the mapping of bird population migration has some super cool maps! Even cooler are the implications: With the country's population as our bird sensor, we can see where birds are migrating orders of magnitude more finely than ever before. Did you ever think of yourself as the sensor?? Well now you can! (Maybe you did if you've ever used the USGS website Did you feel it... What else can we sense?)

The two fundamental operations: Multiplication and Addition.

Not until I got to graduate school did I learn the concept of a Ring. It seems a bit abstract until I realized how fundamental it is-- more on that in a second.

A Ring has two fundamental operations, multiplication and addition. These are two separate fundamental operations on numbers, and mathematicians don't fully understand their relationship (See the links in this post on the abc conjecture). However, we are taught in school that multiplication is repeated addition: 5 times 3 is just 5 added 3 times. While this is true, it's only true in the special case of multiplying whole numbers. 16.4 times pi is not calculated by repeated addition.

I'm writing this now because I recently read this excellent blog post on exactly this point. I then read a very interesting response by a math teacher, who of course himself learned multiplication as repeated addition. Finally there is a follow-up written by the first blog post author.

One of my favorite quotes from Devlin, the original author, is "No wonder so many people end up thinking mathematics is just a bunch of arbitrary, illogical rules that cannot be figured out but simply have to be learned - only for them to have the rug pulled from under them when the rule they just learned is replaced by some other (seemingly) arbitrary, illogical rule."

I think that we should definitely avoid this approach to teaching math. Of course, perhaps some of my peers and I would have loved to learn abstract algebra in grade school-- but presumably, not everyone wants to. Up until high school, I do think that we should focus on teaching what is most practical. But it would be nice if in topics like this, we could teach the more fundamental way, and so both practically-minded students and academic-minded students would do better as they continue to learn more math.

For those who are interested, a Ring is an abstract concept of a set of objects with two operations: addition and multiplication. The set of objects must be "closed under those operations," meaning that if you add or multiply two objects, the result is also in the set. So the integers are a ring. If you add or multiply any two integers, the result is an integer. Also, to be a ring, the addition operator must satisfy associativity, commutativity, distributivity, and the multiplication operator must be associative as well. There must be an additive identity (a+0=a) and an additive inverse for every set element (-a+a=0). These are all basic concepts to which we are introduced in grade school. It's pretty neat to see that they are fundamental principles on which all of mathematics is built.

open access

Thank you to PHD comics for making this nice animation along with a voiceover describing open access publishing, starting with the current state of scholarly publishing and why it needs to change. I admit I am part of the problem-- I do submit to closed journals with a desire to get one of their names on my CV. But with the arxiv and other ways to put our content online, there is now the opportunity share every preprint with open access, and I hope that researchers continue to move in that direction. Hopefully before too long the most prestigious journals will be ones that were invented now as open access.

Air Pollution Sampling

Reading this article from yesterday about "microsampling air pollution" made me hopeful for my submitted NSF proposal on data methods for air pollution sensing. Just as in every area where "bigdata" is making a difference, sensor data collection could make a big impact on understanding our environment and the role it plays in our health.