The new ScienceBlogs homepage just went up, and all of my fellow new SBers are now public. There’s a lot of great new stuff.
Woot! New Science Blog Homepage, and Lots of New Blogs!
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Category Archives: Meta
Next Topic Poll Results; or, the losers win
As I mentioned here, back on the old home of goodmath, I was taking a poll of what good math topic to cover next. In that poll, graph theory and topology were far away the most popular topics, tying for most votes (8 each), compared to no more than 2 votes for any other subject.
So, the next topic I’m going to talk about is: category theory.
There is actually a reason for that. I’m not just ignoring what people voted for. Based on the poll, I was planning on writing about topology, so I started doing some background reading on toplogy. What came up in the first chapter of the book I picked up? Explanations of how to interpret category-theory diagrams, because the author of the text found cat theory to be useful for explaining some of the concepts of topology.
I also looked up some articles on graph theory – in particular, graph isomorphisms, because that’s something I’ve done some work on. And what do I find when I start to read them? Again, category theory diagrams.
And what do I find when I look at wikipedia, to see if I missed anything in my recent series of posts on the semantics of lambda calculus? Category theory.
Category theory is a wierd subject, which has an amazing way of generating incredibly polarizing attitudes among mathematicians. But it’s cropping up more and more in numerous fields of mathematics, and it’s widely used in computer science. There seem to be significant doubts among many people as to whether or not category theory represents anything dramatically new, whether or not it provides new insights that couldn’t have been gained by any other fields of mathematics. But whether or not it’s a source of new knowledge, it seems to be undeniable that it is extremely useful as a tool for understanding and explaining other mathematical fields.
So I will definitely write about topology and graph theory soon. But first, it’s going to be category theory.
Site Banner Request (Update)
A lot of people have said that they’d be willing to try making a banner for the site, but that they’d like me to provide a bit more info on what I’d like.
- Relatively subdued colors; no hot pink. My color preferences generally run towards blues and purples, but pretty much anything that it’s flourescent is fine.
- Headers here run roughly 760 by 90 or so, so roughly that size.
- Easy to read text, including the name of the blog, and the subtitle that are currently there. I’d rather not have funny fonts mixed into the title.
- Something in the background that suggests the kind of math I do. Since my approach to math is much more focused on discrete math topics like structures and logic, I’d prefer to see something like graphs, category diagrams, topologies, or knots than equations.
I’ve already gotten one header suggestion, which I like a lot, so I’ll put it here for you to see the kind of thing I like.
As I said above, I’d prefer to see stuff in the background that’s more up my alley, but I really like the overall look of this one.
Whoever designs the banner that ends up getting picked will, of course, be credited on the “about” page of the blog; I’ll also let you pick a topic for me to write a series of posts about; and if I ever collect the stuff I write for the blog into a book, I’ll send you a free copy.
Site Banner Request
If you take a look around scienceblogs, a lot of the folks here have really beautiful banners for their blogs. Like, for example:
- Aetiology (my personal favorite banner, and one of my favorite blogs)
- Afarensis
- Living the Scientific Life
Unfortunately, while I’m a good math geek and a passable musician, I’m a really horrible artists. So I’m putting a request out to you guys, the readers. Can someone out there with some artistic ability try making a cool goodmath/badmath banner for me?
Welcome and Introducing Myself
Welcome to the new home of Good Math, Bad Math. I thought I’d take the opportunity of moving to this lovely new home to introduce myself. I’m Mark Chu-Carroll, a math geek with a PhD in Computer Science. I work in a corporate research lab, which has asked me not to explicitly mention them here, so they shall remain nameless.
I started blogging just a few months ago, largely inspired by my fellow SB’er, Orac. Orac had posted an entry about a really bad study of autism rates by a “mercury causes autism” proponent. I joined in on the comments; and it struck me that while I knew about tons of really great science blogs debunking the bad science out there, I actually didn’t know of any blogs doing the same for math. On a spur of the moment impulse, I decided to jump in and give it a try.
After a few posts, I decided that I didn’t want my blog to be all negative, so I started also writing about mathematical subjects that interested me. That’s gradually grown to be the majority of what I write about. In fact, right now, back at the old blog, there’s a poll going on about what good math subject I’ll write about next. If you’re interested, pop over there, and add your votes.