Jeff Erickson is a user on mathstodon.xyz. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse. If you don't, you can sign up here.

# Jeff Erickson@jeffgerickson@mathstodon.xyz

Happy Black Friday. As is traditional, wear hooded black robes and listen only to Norwegian black metal music today.

this result will surprise literally nobody but it's still important

"Reviewer bias in single- versus double-blind peer review"

pnas.org/content/early/2017/11

spoilerssss: " ... single-blind reviewers are significantly more likely than their double-blind counterparts to recommend for acceptance papers from famous authors, top universities, and top companies. The estimated odds multipliers are tangible, at 1.63, 1.58, and 2.10, respectively."

😱

The "efficiency gap" makes sense only if you think 3--1 majorities are ideal.
fivethirtyeight.com/features/t

@webmind Now you have to figure out if I boosted ironically or not ;).

Is it just me or is it rather annoying to have people asking for boosts. I'm less inclined to boost if you ask. I'll boost if i want to spread the info. Fav if i like or want to remember. Def not joining the chainletter stupidity.

A Schnyder wood and the resulting straight-line grid embedding of a planar triangulation.

Counting in balanced ternary, from Michael Stifel's Arithmetica Integra, published in 1544. This is part of a general discussion of manipulation of numbers as sums of elements in a geometric series.

The next chapter describes algorithms for computing square roots, cube roots, and so on. A modern formulation of Stifel's algorithms would involve binomial coefficients, so of course Stifel provides a handy illustration of "Pascal's" triangle.

archive.org/details/bub_gb_ywk

New entry!
An Explicit Isometric Reduction of the Unit Sphere into an Arbitrarily Small Ball
Article by Evangelis Bartzos and Vincent Borrelli and Roland Denis and Francis Lazarus and Damien Rohmer and Boris Thibert
Spheres are known...
PDF: math.univ-lyon1.fr/homes-www/b

Matters Computational - Ideas, Algorithms, Source Code
Book by Jörg Arndt
In collection: Basically computer science
This is the book "Matters Computational" (formerly titled "Algorithms for Programmers"), published with Springer.
URL: jjj.de/fxt/fxtbook.pdf

Pricking the Garter: A centuries-old application of the Jordan Curve Theorem. This *might* be the game "fast and loose" that Shakespeare referred to in several of his plays. Jordan published his proof of his eponymous theorem in 1906, although it was formally stated by Bolzano about 60 years earlier, and implicitly assumed by Euclid. This is also a precursor of the textbook parity-based point-in-polygon algorithm discovered by Gauss in the 1840s.

Folding Free-Space Diagrams (from the SOCG 2017 Multimedia program)

Match the Net (from the SOCG 2017 Multimedia program)

The SOCG 2017 proceedings are out!

"If I Were Not upon This Stage" is a traditional pantomime song that requires $n$ parallel singers to sing $n$ verses in $O(n^2)$ time.

Typical panto version:

Monty Python singing one verse: youtube.com/watch?v=zCpyZ6d3dO

Paul McCartney singing zero verses: youtube.com/watch?v=4L_zUiSOTx

First published in 1954 by Thomas Sutton, William Phillips ("Bill Turner"), and Stan Bowsher as "Someone Else I'd Like to Be".

Come spend a semester illustrating mathematics with us, Fall 2019 at ICERM! icerm.brown.edu/programs/sp-f1

The Toilet Paper Problem, by Donald Knuth: jstor.org/stable/2322567

The Urinal Problem, by Evangelos Kranakis and Danny Krizanc: people.scs.carleton.ca/~kranak (Sadly, renamed "Maintaining privacy on a line" for the final journal version, with ATMs replacing urinals.)

@topoology

@birdman According to Augustus de Morgan: "Every inch of a straight line coincides with every other inch, and of a circle with every other of the same circle. Where, then, did Euclid fail? In not introducing the third curve which has the same property---the screw. The right line, the circle, the screw---the representation of translation, rotation, and the two combined...ought to have been the instruments of geometry."

Yardstick Spiral II
oil on canvas, 40"x30"

I just published my first article for Nautilus magazine. It's about near-misses, like the beautiful near-miss polyhedra Craig Kaplan makes and the near-miss that helped mathematicians discover Monstrous Moonshine. I like Kaplan's characterization of a near-miss:
An approximation is “a not-right estimate of a right answer,” Kaplan says, whereas “a near-miss is an exact representation of an almost-right answer.”
nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/