It’s a good week for articles profiling mathematicians. Siobhan Roberts has written a fascinating profile of John Horton Conway at the Guardian, based on her biography of him, Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway. And Gareth Cook has written The Singular Mind of Terry Tao for the New York Times. (Is that a math pun in the title?)

The Tao profile mentions the general (oral) exams at Princeton, and apparently Princeton math PhD students have an archive of student summaries of those exams; here is Tao’s.  (At Penn we had something similar although apparently no longer maintained. Such is inevitable for student-maintained resources like this, I suppose.)

C. Liam Brown has built a Battleship probability calculator, which (roughly speaking) works by finding the square which is the most likely to yield a hit given the set of hits and misses so far. You can play against it if you want. A lot of this might be said to be a web-friendly implementation Nick Berry’s analysis of the game, although analysis and implementation are two different beasts. (Funny, that keeps coming up in my day job…)

I’m a little late to this, but Igor Pak has a list of combinatorics videos (of lectures and seminars) and an explanation of why you should watch them, why you should let people make videos of you, and so on.

(Posting this because I happened to Google something unrelated, found a paper that Pak wrote that was useless to my actual purpose, but then remembered that I’d come across this months ago…)