Weekly links for August 19

The rise and fall of scoring in baseball, a visualization from Smithsonian. (Could this have something to do with the recent surfeit of perfect games?)

Joseph Gallian, in the Notices of the AMS, writes that undergraduate research in mathematics has come of age. (He’s the one behind the Duluth REU.)

Rod Carvalho has reposted, with some cleanup a Google Buzz post by Terence Tao on classical deduction and Bayesian probability. Short version: “one can view classical logic as the qualitative projection of Bayesian probability, or equivalently, one can view Bayesian probability as a quantitative refinement of classical logic.” (How’d I miss this the first time around? Oh, right, I was in the crucnh time on my dissertation.)

How to build a teleportation machine: intro to qubits. (On a related note I’ve been enjoying Umesh Vazirani’s Coursera course Quantum mechanics and quantum computation.

Friendship networks and social status, by Brian Ball and M. E. J. Newman. Quick version: observe which friendships go unreciprocated in high schools. Assume that if A lists B as a friend but not vice versa, then B likely has higher “social status” than A. This gives a ranking by social status.

Vector Racer is an online implementation of the game of Racetrack. (Via Metafilter.)

In the fall of 2001 Jim Propp (then visiting Harvard from Madison, currently at UMass Lowell) taught a course on algebraic combinatorics for undergrads with the explicit goal to “bring [undergraduate!] students to the point of being able to conduct original research in low-dimensional combinatorics, using algebraic and bijective techniques.” Why am I mentioning an eleven-year-old course? Because the videos are available online (see link above). (You’ll need RealPlayer.)

A traveling salesman variant from Twelve Mile Circle: what’s the shortest (in mileage) driving route that hits all of the 48 contiguous states?

Anand Rajaraman and Jeff Ullman’s book Mining of Massive Datasets is downloadable online from the authors. There’s also a hardcopy. (If you pay attention to these sorts of things, it won’t surprise you to learn that the publisher is Cambridge University Press.)

Montgomery County [Maryland] Math Team elevates math to competitive sport, from the Washington Post Magazine.

A mathematician goes to the beach, from Gregory Buck, at the New Yorker culture desk.
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