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GIANT Mayflys on the Tisza River, Silas 2009

I just listened to a wonderful interview of Susan Silas, by Will Corwin of ArtonAir.org, on the occasion of the opening of her exhibit, Helmbrecht’s Walk. It is at the Hebrew Union College Museum on One West 4th Street, NYC, and will be up for the academic year ending in June 2010.

She talks about the walk, of course, but also covers decaying birds and giant mayflys on the Tisza River in Hungary, all apropos of time passing. My dad often swam in the Tisza when he lived in Szolnok and worked at the Cukorgyar (beet sugar factory) before WWII. He always had plenty of sweets to treat the girls on the beach.

Makes me anticipate even more Sean Carroll’s book, From Eternity to Here, due out this week. Then I’ll have the art and science of time covered.

Wishing everyone a sweet New Year!

Oh yeah, … it is!

This is based on real events, and was produced and directed by a NASA astronaut.

On a brighter note, the 2009 online calendar for Yuri’s night parties worldwide is up.

“Yuri Gagarin was the first human to go into space on April 12th, 1961. The US Space Shuttle first launched on April 12th, 1981. Yuri’s Night is like the St Patricks Day or Cinco de Mayo for space. It is one day when all the world can come together and celebrate the power and beauty of space and what it means for each of us.”

Interestingly, there is no party yet for either Boston nor Moscow.

As we guessed, some of the uncaptioned photographs by Life Magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt are indeed of famous mathematicians. We’ve identified 3. Here is the first.

David Blackwell, is perhaps the world’s most famous black mathematician. While the Rao-Blackwell theorem may be his most important, his favorite paper is On an Equation by Wald, written while teaching at Howard University, where he taught for 10 years after a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study with the likes of Einstein and Von Neumann in 1941 at age of 22. That appointment included nomination as a Visiting Fellow at Princeton, causing controversy and opposition from the University adminstration. Perhaps that is why he only applied to teach at black colleges.

In 1954 things had changed sufficiently to where he could move to the new Statistics department at UC Berkeley. In 1965, a year after these photos were taken, he became the first black elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He co-wrote a classic textbook that is still in print. There is a wondeful interview from 2002 online. Professor Blackwell is actively retired in Northern California with his large family. Next April 24^th he celebrates his 90^th birthday.

Okay, its Autumnal not Vernal, but can’t an Equinox go by without egg balancing, and the obligatory reference to the Bad Astronomer’s explanations.  According to the Astronomy Picture of the Day (available as a Windows background), edited by Robert Nemiroff, who has a free Astronomy course online, and Jerry Bonnell, apparently no.   APOD again published the picture of BA Plait (whose new book is out October 20th) balancing eggs in his kitchen.  The kids above show Phil up by balancing eggs on their (Blefuscudian) small end.

Update: eggPOD

What is simultaneously the coldest place in the Universe and 100,000 times the temperature of the Sun?  It is also the largest machine ever built – the Large Haldron Collider (LHC) – scheduled for first light beam tomorrow.  Check out the popular rap.  

It will take months to tune the beam to full power, but the LHC’s ATLAS detector should definitively answer the question of whether the Higgs particle exists or not.  Higgs is the famous “God” particle which would explain the reason for mass.  It is the only particle in the Standard Model of Physics yet to be observed. The Atom Smashers is a documentary film of the competition to discover Higgs before the LHC came online.

Equally interesting is the ALICE experiment, pictured above being inserted into the Time Projection Chamber (this is not science fiction!). Instead of smashing protons, ALICE will look at the quark/gluon soup created from smashing something heavier (lead), a recipe that hasn’t existed since shortly after the Big Bang. It may answer questions like why we find the Universe is mostly matter instead of matter/antimatter, and what is that mysterious Dark matter.

You can participate with LHC@home. The voyage begins tomorrow with live video from CERN.

In 2004 he was the first high school teacher to be an invited speaker at the MAA’s MathFest.  Steve Sigur also co-wrote a book with arguably the most famous mathematician of our time, John H. Conway.  Aside from being a gifted mathematician - as the many testimonies of his students attest [1][2][3][4], Steve Sigur was, for nearly 30 years, a gifted teacher.  When stricken with the same deadly brain cancer that recently afflicted Senator Edward Kennedy, he underwent experimental procedures at Duke University that enabled him to continue teaching for over a year; and incidentally, finish his triangle-shaped-full-color-with-software-included-book, The Triangle Book (not available yet).

As Philip Davis’ 1995 paper (pdf) points out, triangles have a long and rich history, from Euler’s Elements to the work of Emile Lemoine.  To understand beyond 1995 The Modern Geometry of the Triangle you must read Sigur’s paper (pdf).  His web pages are chock full of triangle math and other delights.  But the crown jewel is a set of interviews the Paideia School did with him.  Here he discusses his love for life.

Steve Sigur died last month.

Simon Plouffe has a new Inverter containing over 2.459 BILLION constants.  A few of the most interesting ones are named after mathematicians.  Can you match the constant with the name(s) without looking?

Dear friends, both known and unknown to me, fellow Russians, and people of all countries and continents, in a few minutes a mighty spaceship will carry me into the far-away expanses of space. What can I say to you in these last minutes before the start? At this instant, the whole of my life seems to be condensed into one wonderful moment. Everything I have experienced and done till now has been in preparation for this moment. You must realize that it is hard to express my feeling now that the test for which we have been training long and passionately is at hand. I don’t have to tell you what I felt when it was suggested that I should make this flight, the first in history. Was it joy? No, it was something more than that. Pride? No, it was not just pride. I felt great happiness. To be the first to enter the cosmos, to engage single handed in an unprecedented duel with nature – could anyone dream of anything greater than that? But immediately after that I thought of the tremendous responsibility I bore: to be the first to do what generations of people had dreamed of; to be the first to pave the way into space for mankind. This responsibility is not toward one person, not toward a few dozen, not toward a group. It is a responsibility toward all mankind – toward its present and its future. Am I happy as I set off on this space flight? Of course I’m happy. After all, in all times and epochs the greatest happiness for man has been to take part in new discoveries. It is a matter of minutes now before the start. I say to you, ‘Until we meet again,’ dear friends, just as people say to each other when setting out on a long journey. I would like very much to embrace you all, people known and unknown to me, close friends and strangers alike. See you soon! – Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, first person in space, April 12, 1961