Tag Archives: timothy gowers

The Thing Last Week With That Sexist Paper

Once again the mathematical world is rocked with scandal. Let me get you quickly up to speed. It started when a controversial paper on the variability hypothesis was accepted to the Mathematical Intelligencer. Shortly thereafter, University of Chicago mathematics professor … Continue reading

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Some Stories of Journals Behaving Badly

Hoax papers have a long and time-honored history. Ten years ago a group of students from MIT wrote a program that randomly generated totally nonsensical computer science papers. One of their bogus papers was accepted by a conference and it … Continue reading

Posted in Issues in Higher Education, Publishing in Math, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

That Time Terence Tao Won $500 From Paul Erdős

Suppose you have some arbitrary sequence of 1 and -1, something like this 1, 1, -1, -1, -1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, -1, -1, …. And suppose you start plucking entries from fixed intervals and adding them together. For … Continue reading

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On Teaching Analysis

Timothy Gowers, University of Cambridge mathematician and Fields Medalist, is teaching an analysis class this term, and fortunately for me, he’s blogging about it. Analysis IA is part of the first-year math major sequence at the University of Cambridge, and … Continue reading

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