The last few years has seen many attempts by researchers to break free from the shackles of (commercial) journal publishers. There's the whole-sale exodus that produced the ACM Transactions on Algorithms, as well as other journals, and technology aided creation...

No, not that kind.By now, many of you have probably heard of the massively collaborative math experiment being conducted by Timothy Gowers on his blog (with offshoots on Terry Tao's blog). The idea is to mount a serious attack on a conjecture in combinatorics...

Joe O'Rourke mentions that his classic on art gallery problems is now available for free online. Download it now ! And while you're at it, buy his book on folding (with Erik Demaine). I just bought the folding book (and have already assigned one class project...

It's back-to-school night at the carnival of mathematics. Time to revisit, reflect, and ponder on things we think we already know.Estraven at Proving Theorems wishes that mathematicians today spent more time revisiting and bring up to date older, more inaccessible...

Via Cosma Shalizi comes a new way of ranking journals developed by Jevin West, Ben Althouse, Martin Rosvall, Ted Bergstrom, and Carl Bergstrom. It works on the PageRank principle: take a random paper from a journal and do a random walk on the citations, using...

ACM has announced its Fellows for 2008. Familar names on the list include:Sanjeev AroraKen Clarkson.Steve Cook Michel GoemansIan MunroMadhu SudanIn the related area of game theory, Xiaotie Deng and Tuomas Sandholm were honored as well. Congratulations to all...

It was a common joke to point out how people really overestimate low or zero probability events. Why in the pre-flight briefing do the flight attendants teach us not one but two ways to inflate our life vests when there has never been a successful emergency...

Malcolm Gladwell writes about coffee. Erds's unadulterated self was less real and less familiar to him than his adulterated self, and that is a condition that holds, more or less, for the rest of society as well. Part of what it means to be human in the modern...

(A quick note: Howard Karloff is organizing an excursion to the South Pacific during SODA.) And now for todays post: What do the names Pascal, Hilbert and Mittag-Leffler have in common, aside from all being names of math folks? I have AN answer in mind. You...