Link Salad, the Prodigious Seer Edition
-- Encounter with the Infinite - Robert Schneider with Benjamin Phelan, The Believer, Feb. 2015
"Take the tau function, an oddity that Ramanujan discovered and studied during his five years at Cambridge. A function is a mathematical expression that, when fed with a number, produces another number. It’s a machine that takes some raw material and then stretches, compresses, reshapes, or transforms it into something else. Functions embody the relationships between numbers; they are central objects of study in number theory. Ramanujan found the tau function important enough to spend upward of thirty pages in his notebook exploring it, but it was hard for other mathematicians to see why he’d been so interested. On its face, there was nothing special about the tau function. Hardy, Ramanujan’s chief collaborator at Cambridge, worried that the tau function’s homeliness might lead future mathematicians to see it as a mathematical “backwater.” For decades after Ramanujan’s death, it was treated as one."
-- Calm, Well-Adjusted Nation’s Reading Comprehension Hits 100 Percent - Rob Harvilla, The Ringer, Oct. 25, 2016
"The result is The Onion with no mean streak. Or, if you personally have a significant mean streak, The Onion with no edge. “BP Says Oil in Gulf Must Be Changed Every Six Months.” “Afghan War Not Going Very Well, Reports Duh Magazine.” “Michele Bachmann Proposes ‘Don’t Add, Don’t Spell.’” “Obama Signs Executive Order Relocating Congress to Guantánamo.” “Fact Checker at Republican Debate Hospitalized for Exhaustion.” You can imagine the admiring folks at the Sarah Silverman talk chuckling at some of those, and it is a little churlish, in these morbid end times, to begrudge them for it. He’s prolific, and consistent, and unfailingly topical. We’ll get to the Trump stuff in a minute, but you get the point. And that’s the point: that you immediately get the point. It’s easy, it’s broad, it’s worldview-flattering to your prototypical New Yorker subscriber. You get the references. You know how to feel. You chortle knowingly from the Right Side of History."
"Take the tau function, an oddity that Ramanujan discovered and studied during his five years at Cambridge. A function is a mathematical expression that, when fed with a number, produces another number. It’s a machine that takes some raw material and then stretches, compresses, reshapes, or transforms it into something else. Functions embody the relationships between numbers; they are central objects of study in number theory. Ramanujan found the tau function important enough to spend upward of thirty pages in his notebook exploring it, but it was hard for other mathematicians to see why he’d been so interested. On its face, there was nothing special about the tau function. Hardy, Ramanujan’s chief collaborator at Cambridge, worried that the tau function’s homeliness might lead future mathematicians to see it as a mathematical “backwater.” For decades after Ramanujan’s death, it was treated as one."
-- Calm, Well-Adjusted Nation’s Reading Comprehension Hits 100 Percent - Rob Harvilla, The Ringer, Oct. 25, 2016
"The result is The Onion with no mean streak. Or, if you personally have a significant mean streak, The Onion with no edge. “BP Says Oil in Gulf Must Be Changed Every Six Months.” “Afghan War Not Going Very Well, Reports Duh Magazine.” “Michele Bachmann Proposes ‘Don’t Add, Don’t Spell.’” “Obama Signs Executive Order Relocating Congress to Guantánamo.” “Fact Checker at Republican Debate Hospitalized for Exhaustion.” You can imagine the admiring folks at the Sarah Silverman talk chuckling at some of those, and it is a little churlish, in these morbid end times, to begrudge them for it. He’s prolific, and consistent, and unfailingly topical. We’ll get to the Trump stuff in a minute, but you get the point. And that’s the point: that you immediately get the point. It’s easy, it’s broad, it’s worldview-flattering to your prototypical New Yorker subscriber. You get the references. You know how to feel. You chortle knowingly from the Right Side of History."