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Friendship, privacy and the mathematical laws of society
It may sound frivolous to say that a link in a social network graph is the mathematical definition of friendship, or that the membership relationships established by Google+ circles and the associated...
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A Deeper Sense of Mystery
If you had had to create a machine with the objective of exploring the broadest possible set of "logical" possibilities, what other means would you have used better than an open Godel-ish mathematical...
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The Feynman Lectures on Art
I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature,...
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Yet Another Beautiful Mind
Shakuntala Devi, an Indian mathematical wizard known as “the human computer”, died in Bangalore last Sunday at the age of 83. She was one of the world’s most prodigious mental calculators on record,...
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Bandits and Corporate Schizophrenia
The story has it that Richard Feynman and his biographer Ralph Leighton had a hard time at restaurants deciding whether to order the best dish they had tried so far […]
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On Being the Right Size
How cool! This essay by J. B. S. Haldane is delicious. If you ever had a doubt, after reading it you will doubt no more: size absolutely matters The most obvious differences […]
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A Not So Benevolent Knowledge
Most people I know love classifications. They need to feel that they can, like entomologists, pin the things they find into their corresponding boxes and under their proper names: the […]
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History is a Roller Coaster
General well-being tends to move in the opposite direction from inequality: when inequality grows, well-being declines, and vice versa. In this interesting infographic, Peter Turchin sketches the...
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Unreasonable Beauty
[Mathematical beauty] “is a quality which cannot be defined any more than beauty in art can be defined, but which people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating,” […]
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Living in a Computer
We are living in a computer programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs. We […]
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Will Truth Exist When No One Can Understand It?
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”(1) Science is likely moving at a slower pace than it should […]
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Here Is The Reason Why Sports Are So Boring
After analysing 40,000 games of basketball, hockey and American football (college and professional), Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado and colleagues have found that a random walk model...
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It Is Beautiful, Therefore It Exists
General Relativity is the reason why I decided to study physics many years ago. (Too many to confess here.) Tomorow is the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s presentation to the Prussian […]
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Appearances Can Be Deceiving
Social behaviours are often contagious. To adopt a new technology or idea, listen to music, engage in risky behaviour, or join a social movement, people usually observe others before making […]
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You’ve got to feel it
For some reason, the smartest people seem to put a high value on beauty and understanding. At 86, Michael Atiyah is still on his quest for both, as you can read here in Quanta. Just a pearl (my...
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The bloody math of Mr. Musk
This Wednesday, Tesla announced “Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars.” All future Model S, X and 3 will come equipped with Level 5 capabilities, the highest designation for automated car...
View ArticleAn “edge-reinforced” random walk down to innovation
Empirical studies show that the emergence of novelties follows similar patterns in a wide variety of contexts, including science, knowledge and information, goods and products, language, but also...
View ArticleGödel in the machine (learning)
Machine learning deals with various kinds of statistical problems, such as pattern recognition, regression, and clustering, sharing a similar goal which can be roughly stated as: “Approximate a target...
View ArticleDo Slime Molds Dream of Dark Matter Universes?
A simple single-cell organism that may be growing on your lawn is helping astronomers probe the largest structures in the universe. The orgamism is no other than Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold...
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