goodmath

Janet over at Adventures in Ethics and Science has tagged all of us newbies with a Pi meme. As the new math-geek-in-residence here, I'm obligated to take on anything dealing with Pi. 3 reasons you blog about science Because I genuinely enjoy teaching, and the one thing that I regret about…

As usual, once a week, the Seed folks send all of us a question from one of the SB readers: Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why? I've actually got two answers to that question.…

One of my favorite places on the net to find really goofy bad math is Answers in Genesis. When I'm trying to avoid doing real work, I like to wander over there and look at the crazy stuff that people will actually take seriously in order to justify their religion. In my latest swing by over there…

For me, the frustrating thing about learning category theory was that it seemed to be full of definitions, but that I couldn't see why I should care. What were these category things, and what could I really talk about using this strange new mathematical language of categories? To avoid that in my…

The new ScienceBlogs homepage just went up, and all of my fellow new SBers are now public. There's a lot of great new stuff.

What kind of music does a math geek listen to? Capercaille: Who will raise their voice?. Traditional celtic folk music. Very beautiful song. Seamus Egan: Weep Not for the Memories. Mostly traditional Irish music, by a bizzarely talented multi-instrumentalist. Seamus Egan is one of the best…

One of the things that I find niftiest about category theory is category diagrams. A lot of things that normally turn into complex equations or long-winded logical statements can be expressed in diagrams by capturing the things that you're talking about in a category, and then using category…

Back at my old digs last week, I put up a post about programming languages and types. It produced an interesting discussion, which ended up shifting topics a bit, and leading to a very interesting question from one of the posters, and since the answer actually really does involve math, I'm going to…

To get started, what is category theory? Back in grad school, I spent some time working with a thoroughly insane guy named John Case who was the new department chair. When he came to the university, he brought a couple of people with him, to take temporary positions. One of them was a category…

I've gotten an absolutely unprecedented number of requests to write about RFK Jr's Rolling Stone article about the 2004 election. RFK Jr's article tries to argue that the 2004 election was stolen. It does a wretched, sloppy, irresponsible job of making the argument. The shame of it is that I…

As I mentioned here, back on the old home of goodmath, I was taking a poll of what good math topic to cover next. In that poll, graph theory and topology were far away the most popular topics, tying for most votes (8 each), compared to no more than 2 votes for any other subject. So, the next…

A lot of people have said that they'd be willing to try making a banner for the site, but that they'd like me to provide a bit more info on what I'd like. Relatively subdued colors; no hot pink. My color preferences generally run towards blues and purples, but pretty much anything that it's…

If you take a look around scienceblogs, a lot of the folks here have really beautiful banners for their blogs. Like, for example: Aetiology (my personal favorite banner, and one of my favorite blogs) Afarensis Living the Scientific Life Unfortunately, while I'm a good math geek and a passable…

One of the things I get to do now as a member of the scienceblogs gang is answer these weekly "Ask a science blogger" questions. This weeks is actually really quite appropriate for me given stuff going on this week at home. The question: "Do you think there is a brain drain going on (i.e. foreign…

Welcome to the new home of Good Math, Bad Math. I thought I'd take the opportunity of moving to this lovely new home to introduce myself. I'm Mark Chu-Carroll, a math geek with a PhD in Computer Science. I work in a corporate research lab, which has asked me not to explicitly mention them here, so…