Random Curiosities (II)

Again a full reading list that I've compiled, the most interesting items are selected for the 'random curiosities' of this week. It seems to me that these lists will surely help me to keep track of my readings and interests over time and it will be definitely interesting to look back..

• The first item on the list is a great documentary I've watched recently which is called 'The Emergence of Network Science' featuring Steven Strogatz. It is mainly focused on graphs and especially the famous 'six-degree of seperation' problem and gives the new emerging science of networks. I've met many new names from the film and one of the major ones is A. Barabasi and his wonderful new book 'Network Science'. It is published online and it seems like a great resource. I will definitely check it out before the 'Applied Graph Theory' course in Nesin Matematik Village which I'll be participating this summer.

• A game-theoretical ecological article called 'The hawk–dove game in a sexually reproducing species explains a colourful polymorphism of an endangered bird' in the recent issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It examines the famous 'hawk-dove game' behaviour in the Gouldian finches population and derives the conditions for the evolutionary beneficial polymorphism to be retained in the population. Link for the article.

• A recent article from C. Veller and M. Nowak titled "Extended flowering intervals of bamboos evolved by discrete multiplication" which is about the mathematical pattern involving the flowering of bamboo plants (Link for the article). There is a nice overview of the paper called 'Bamboo Mathematicians' in Carl Zimmer's blog.

• Another interesting find from Strogatz twitter feed: 'Winning at Rock Paper Scissors'.. A great numberphile video discussing a 'real-life' strategy for the renowned Rock-Paper-Scissors game using game theory. In relation to that, I've discovered an interesting article of Strogatz, namely 'Nonlinear Dynamics of the Rock-Paper-Scissors Game with Mutations'...

• From New York Times, an article on mathematical population model of blue crabs in Chesapeake Bay which is based on a field data: Mathematicians and Blue Crabs

• Another interesting article on the models of evolutionary mechanism from Yale which proposes “house of cards” model — which holds that mutations with large effects effectively reshuffle the genomic deck — explains evolutionary processes better than the theory that species undergo the accumulation of many mutations with small effects. Further read: In evolution, ‘house of cards’ model wins

• Quanta Magazine has published an interesting article about genetically identical flies and their diverging individual behaviours studied through genetic and environmental variations. Details in the article: 'Animal Copies Reveal Roots of Individuality'

• Nautilus is running a very interesting theme this month: 'Error' with a sub-title "How does the scientist negotiate the hall of mirrors and come out clutching the truth?..." Worth checking out..

• An inspiring read from the great mathematician V. I. Arnold 'On Mathematics Education' from the archives of Dynamical Systems Magazine.

• Book find of the week: A Mathematical Nature Walk by John A. Adam. Full of wonderful questions about various natural phenomena and inspiring models and answers for them. Definitely a gem. (Book link)

Random Curiosities - I

There are always a lot of things that I encounter which make me think that I should write them on the blog but had no time to do so... In order to deal with it and keep some kind of an 'interesting reading list' for myself and for interested other, I decided to share these 'random curiosities' in a bulk manner. So here are this week's:

- The most significant and interesting thing that I've learnt this week was the so-called 'Benford's Law'. It is an unintuitive law that concerns the frequency distributions of the first digits of random-data. I will definitely elaborate on this one in one of my future post but there are a lot of great references where you can dive deep into it! For instance this article from Plus Maths really nails it down really nicely! If you have only 10 minutes, this video from Numberphile would work too..

- Moving on with statistics and there is this really curious article in Quanta Magazine called 'For Persi Diaconis’ Next Magic Trick'. It is about shuffling a deck of cards in order to make them 'random'. But the method proposed is not ordinary shuffling, which they have already proven that only seven shuffle is enough to achieve it, but 'smooshing' which is basically spreading the cards out on a table, swishing them around with your hands, and then gathering them up. Standford mathematician Persi Diaconis's proposal involves one of the fundamental ideas of statistical physics namely mixing. Quite an inspiring read...

- One of my past-time activities, especially in the busy traffic of Istanbul is to listen to interesting podcasts on the way and one of my favourite is ABC's 'Future Tense'. It is some kind of a 'futuristic' program but all the ideas have grounds on the present, it is not a sci-fi kind of future in a sense. One of the last week's program was themed 'Crowds and Motion' which deals with interesting problems and proposed solutions to urban planning and modeling the crowds as particles and simulations related with it. There was two interesting models, one with pedestrians walking in open space avoiding collisions and other one, namely "Steffen Method" of Airplane Boarding.. Further details and recorded audio is on the website.

- Web's first-class online science magazine Nautilus's this months theme is 'Dominoes' and their first week's installment includes a fascinating article called 'The Amazing, Autotuning Sandpile'. It is one of those 'simple to state but having jaw-dropping consequences' kind of problems of statistical physics. Simple mathematical model of a sand pile creating a very complex and dynamical patterns and behaviour, namely avalanches. The article is accompanied by nice pictures and simulations..

- Biology related, another Quanta Mag. article released this week was 'How Structure Arose in the Primordial Soup', telling the story of the search of the origins of fundamental transitions like formation of the cell, creation of the genetic code and making up the energy supplying metabolism functions way before the last common ancestor. The main ideas resonates with a Maynard Smith's wonderful book that I've been reading recently, The Origins of Life, and also an interesting method is proposed involving tracing the amino-acid code in the Tree of Life. An inspiring read...

- Academic tips and tricks side, I've read a very well-written compact blog post related to 'A few steps toward cleaner, better-organized code' which I desperately need more and more.

- And also a seemingly a trivia but one of the most complex thing that I've seen lately, solving a 17 X 17 Rubick's Cube. It is just beyond explanation...