Books by Number - The Improbability Principle

Over this summer I am participating in Google Summer of Code 2017 (GSOC).This will be my second , and sadly final, time participating in GSOC. (The funding so nice you can only get it twice! Plus, I'd have to still be a student and lucky for me I just graduated with my M.A. in mathematics from Saint Louis University!)   I will again be coding for SAGE Mathematical Software System, an open source database. An open source database is made up of code available for public use and modification.

TFAE stands for “the following are equivalent.” This statement is fairly common in mathematical theorems. Why, you may ask? Well, there is a lot of power in being able to do something multiple ways. It gives us options to find one that can best fit our mathematical needs. A very familiar example of equivalency would be the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, it tells us we can either evaluate the integral or anti-differentiate. A less familiar example is Euclid’s propositions 5 and

As biographies go, you want to be enthralled, you want to be reminded what you already know and learn more. With graphic novels, and now graphic biographies and memoirs, as a growing Genre I thought a comparison of three I read would be insightfull. I'm enjoying this genre so much I just couldn't resist. Special thanks to Steenz, my library friend for turning me on to graphic novels in general. The graphic biographies I read were The Case of Alan Turing: The Extraordinary and Tragic Story of

Coming in at 253 pages, this is the little book which is full of mathematical gold. Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote The Number Devil in 1998. This was when I was 8, and in 4th grade. How did I miss this gem? I would have fallen down the mathematical rabbit hole even sooner. Disguised as a novel, the math in this book includes: Pascal's Triangle, Fibonacci Numbers, set theory, factorials, math 'tricks', and math history. It even has a brief excerpt of Russell's proof that 1+1 equals 2 (although

For my undergraduate thesis my focus was in knot theory, a subset of topology and a newer subject in mathematics. These are not the knots we think of in our daily life. The knots I studied had no ends and no thickness. Knots as we know them in everyday life have been around since before the Greeks. The book of Kells is decorated with intricate knot work. Sailors have used them on their ships. The Incas even used them to keep track of their accounting. The Incan civilization started in modern day

Over the summer I have been coding for SAGE as part of Google Summer of Code 2016.  I feel this opportunity has strengthened both my skills as a coder and as a mathematician. SAGE is an open source math software system, used to do calculations.  SAGE is made up of code available for free public use and modification. It is a collaborative effort where people from around the world can add new code, update old code, and share the changes that they make. Open source coding is a labor of

In the 1960’s French writer and poet Raymond Queneau became the most prolific writers of our time by writing over one hundred thousand billion poems.  If you wanted to read all of these poems it would only take you 200 million years of reading 24 hours a day at a rate of about one poem per minute.  So how could Queneau write so many poems in far less time than it would take to read them all? The truth is he didn’t actually write that many individual poems. What he did was write ten 14-line

One of the great joys in life that not all will be able to experience is when your code builds. When you have fixed all the syntax errors you build it, you test it, and you see ---------------------------------------------------------------------- All tests passed! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Having to wait for your code to build is agonizing. You pray to some God, magic force, or Steve Jobs to help you in this time of need. Then it works and you feel

Two weeks into GSOC 2016 I’m so grateful that this is how I get to spend my summer. Using my coding muscles has made me stronger and more confident with my code. I am ready to create my first ticket in SAGE relating to GSOC. Sage uses Trac, which is an open source project managing software. It allows SAGE to track what people are currently working on for SAGE. It does this by are giving a ticket number to each piece of functionality pushed to the server. Peers, who pull them from the server,