Equalis - another Science 2.0 tool

A few days ago I got a message from Carmine Napolitano, who is a co-founder of recently launched Equalis project. It's a kind of new "Science 2.0" social network for sharing ideas, blogging, connecting people and tackling math-related problems together. I didn't get deeply into it, but it's worth checking out.

Naming kids is hard

Last year chemistry Nobel laureate Dudley Herschbach was giving a plenary talk at the Faraday Discussions conference. After the talk he got a question somehow related to angular momentum algebra and started his answer with

"You know, I love angular momentum. I even blame my parents for not naming me 'Angular momentum'!"

What puzzles me a bit is the whole 'naming kids' business. I can understand that guys far from math don't name children using indeces or primes, although 'Anna-double-prime' or 'John-three' looks and sounds great. But if people stick with the name of the mother/father while naming their dauther/son they should use something of that sort. Vladimir-prime Vladimirovich Putin, for instance.

Math is like love

There is a famous quote by R. Drabek:

"Math is like love - a simple idea but it can get complicated."

Does anyone know who this guy Drabek was (or is)? It looks like wiki has no idea about him, I cannot figure out even his first name.

Thanks for collaborating :-)

Misha

von Neumann's words come true

Everyone heard a famous quote of John von Neumann: "with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk".

A friend of mine Valera Yundin sent me a link to an awesome article:

Jürgen Mayer, Khaled Khairy, Jonathon Howard, "Drawing an elephant with four complex parameters", Am. J. Phys. 78, 648 (2010)

And it works!


That is definitely something to highlight in the Max Planck Research magazine :-)


Take care,

Misha