Slashdot Mirror

fustflum writes "R. F. Arenstorf from Vanderbilt University has presented a 38-page possible proof of the twin-prime conjecture using methods from classical analytic number theory. The paper is on arxiv.org and is freely available to the public. Twin primes are pairs of primes where both p and p + 2 are prime. "It is conjectured that there are an infinite number of twin primes ... but proving this remains one of the most elusive open problems in number theory." More information about twin primes can be found on Mathworld."

fustflum writes "R. F. Arenstorf from Vanderbilt University has presented a 38-page possible proof of the twin-prime conjecture using methods from classical analytic number theory. The paper is on arxiv.org and is freely available to the public. Twin primes are pairs of primes where both p and p + 2 are prime. "It is conjectured that there are an infinite number of twin primes ... but proving this remains one of the most elusive open problems in number theory." More information about twin primes can be found on Mathworld."

Best ID Ever! asks: "Poker, a fascinating intersection of math, game theory, and observation of human behavior, is currently exploding in popularity due to televised high-stakes tournaments such as the World Poker Tour and Binion's 2003 World Series of Poker. Many of today's top professional players have nerdly roots such as Mathematicians, chess prodigies, or backgammon champions. A few pros, including 2000 champion Chris Ferguson, even used to play poker in the IRC poker community. This year's World Series final event, which began Saturday and lasts through the week, drew 2600 participants, more than three times the number of participants in 2003. How many Slashdot readers play poker, and what do you think of Poker's upswing?"

gotscheme writes "When Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame self-published A New Kind of Science in 2002, he raised the suspicions of many in scientific communities that he was taking advantage of a lot of other people's work for his sole financial gain and that he was going against the open nature of academia by using restrictive copyright. Yesterday, Wolfram and company released the entire contents of NKS for free on the Web (short registration required). Perhaps Wolfram is giving back to the scientific community; perhaps it is simply clever marketing for a framework that is beginning to gain momentum. For any matter, the entire encyclopedic volume is online, and this appears to be a positive step for scientific writing."

3Suns asks: "There are many proprietary symbolic mathematics suites available, including Mathcad, Mathematica, and Maple. Strangely, I can't find a single free software project with similar functionality. These programs are as ubiquitous in universities and engineering companies as they are expensive. Given the deep roots of open-source in higher education, what can explain the lack of free/open-source mathematics software?" We last addressed this question three years ago, but a lot can change in that time. Has it?

jabberjaw writes "Nature is reporting that a set of two pulsars could be emitting gravitational waves. Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his general theory of relativity, but a gravitational wave has yet to be detected. Find out more about gravitational waves and pulsars at Eric Weisstein's World of Physics."

jabberjaw writes "Nature is reporting that a set of two pulsars could be emitting gravitational waves. Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his general theory of relativity, but a gravitational wave has yet to be detected. Find out more about gravitational waves and pulsars at Eric Weisstein's World of Physics."

jabberjaw writes "Nature is reporting that a set of two pulsars could be emitting gravitational waves. Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his general theory of relativity, but a gravitational wave has yet to be detected. Find out more about gravitational waves and pulsars at Eric Weisstein's World of Physics."

alien88 writes "The Seventeen or Bust project announced today that they have discovered the fourth largest prime on record. The prime is 1,521,561 digits long and is their sixth discovery since the start of the project. They now have 11 multipliers left to prove that k = 78,557 is the smallest Sierpinski number. Randy Sundquist of Team ExtremeDC's computer discovered the number on December 6th."

An anonymous reader writes "I thought Slashdot would have picked this up several days ago, but apparently not. Although you still won't see any mention of it on the RSA challenge site, Mathworld is carrying the news that a team at the German Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik submitted a factorization of RSA-576 on December 3. RSA-576 is the smallest challenge number that RSA Security offers a cash prize for, to the tune of $10,000"

An anonymous reader writes "I thought Slashdot would have picked this up several days ago, but apparently not. Although you still won't see any mention of it on the RSA challenge site, Mathworld is carrying the news that a team at the German Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik submitted a factorization of RSA-576 on December 3. RSA-576 is the smallest challenge number that RSA Security offers a cash prize for, to the tune of $10,000"

PowerVegetable asks: "What's the story with handheld computation? Not address books and schedule reminders; I'm talking about the type of stuff computers were invented for. Anyone who's used Mathematica or Maple knows what desktop computers are capable of these days math-wise, but handheld computation seems to have fallen behind on the innovation front. Cell phones and handheld game systems have certainly enjoyed rapid advancement, so where are the handheld mathematical portable oracles? What's available that doesn't have obscure menu systems, bad displays, underpowered processors and unwieldy programming languages? Pickings are slim in the hard-coded calculator industry, but what about Pocket PC's or other programmable portables? Is there any portable solution out there that's more capable than my old HP49g?"

dpp writes "Astronomers working on the eSTAR Project have used software "Intelligent Agents" to control the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and observe a dwarf nova. One of the astronomers says "The Agents can detect and respond to the rapidly changing universe faster than any human... [they] can be used to assist human observers, instead of replacing them entirely - augmenting their abilities to do science quicker, faster, and more reliably." Next up: getting results sent automatically to your 2.5G/3G mobile phone (with images!), and deploying on more telescopes including the Liverpool Telescope and the Faulkes Telescopes. The full story is at the Joint Astronomy Centre."

TheMatt writes "As reported on PhysicsWeb and published in Science (subscription required), researchers at AIST and co-workers believe they have found evidence of magnetic monopoles. They observed an anomalous Hall effect in a ferromagnetic crystal that they say can only be explained via magnetic monopoles. To refresh your memory, magnetic monopoles are the magnetic analogue of electrons and other charged particles--a "north" or "south" pole only. Dirac in 1931 showed that the existence of a magnetic monopole naturally leads to the quantization of electric and magnetic charge. Thus, showing the existence of just one magnetic monopole would be quite profound for physics, but their mass (> 10^16 GeV) has made searches for them difficult."

PS writes "The BBC is reporting that a village in eastern India was struck by a meteorite Saturday evening, wrecking several houses and injuring about twenty people. Fortunately, no one appears to have been killed by the impact or subsequent fires. CNN suggests that a second village near the impact site may have also been struck by part of the meteorite." Human/meteorite encounters are not entirely unheard of.

Fred Reynolds writes "You'd think that predicting human behavior would be easy. A moment or two's reflection, and it's obvious that people act to further their own interests. And in fact, the science of economics is founded on this observation. So everyone should be a rational economizer, busy calculating their individual costs and benefits, and acting accordingly. Right?" Since things aren't quite so simple, Reynolds has reviewed Robert R. Prechter's Socionomics: the Science of History and Social Prediction; read on for the rest. Socionomics: the Science of History and Social Prediction author Robert R. Prechter, Jr. pages 900 + publisher New Classics Library rating Oustanding reviewer Fred Reynolds ISBN 0932750575 summary A new science of human social prediction

Yet...it's also easy to see that people do a lot of nutty things, and usually do so in groups. They wear leg warmers, wide neckties, then narrow neckties. Long skirts, short skirts. No skirts. Paisley. They ride roller skates, then scooters. They buy Pet Rocks, collectible Beanie Babies, and stocks of dot-com companies with no profits and no business plan. They ingest odd substances, and subscribe to odd belief systems. They also fight wars, and blow up themselves and others.

This jackass behavior has lead to some telling but apparently casual observations, such as this gem by Charles MacKay: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." Offhand observation aside, it remains true that the non-rational behavior of human beings in society has usually made monkeys out of those who seriously attempt to forecast it.

This is why Robert Prechter's 2-volume opus Socionomics: The Science of History and Social Prediction is such a joy to read. It's a credible and provocative attempt to found a predictive science of human social behavior. It's also a truly different work. The number of new propositions and arguments advanced in Socionomics is matched by their highly controversial nature, and by the amount of evidence put forth by Prechter and his co-authors. Readers looking for non-fiction that is wide in scope, provocative, and meaty will enjoy these two books.

What's It All About?

It's helpful to think of Prechter's massive argument as if it was structured like an hour-glass. The first volume of the set, The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior and the New Science of Socionomics (hereafter: HSB) is the fat upper part of the glass. It provides the theoretical justification for a shorter set of linked propositions or principles that constitute the narrow neck. The second volume,Pioneering Studies in Socionomics (hereafter: PSS) consists of a series of essays and articles that apply those principles to a wide swath of human endeavor: music, sports, politics, war and peace, scientific and intellectual trends, religion, economics and finance. This is the fat bottom of the glass, the payoff of analysis and prediction.

The Propositions

Socionomics has been defined as

the field of study encompassing the origins and effects of an endogenous human social dynamic called the Wave Principle, a specific sequence of progress and regress that regulates the complex system of collective mood and social interaction. It examines and forecasts market and social trends on the following basis: that the character of social, political, cultural, financial and economic trends are the product of collective human psychology, which is based upon an unconscious herding impulse deriving from pre-rational portions of the brain.

This definition shows why Socionomics... is a two-volume set: it's not easily summarized.

Any science must have a way to measure its subject. Prechter claims that human social behavior can be measured with several meters, but the most accurate meter is the movement and fluctuation of economic values, as expressed in stock markets every trading day. He believes that markets provide a real-time reflection of the collective social mood. Measuring social mood is important because:

1. The events of history and culture are driven by the engine of collective social mood. Social mood temporally and logically precedes social events, and is the cause of social events. War and terrorism don't cause distressed people; distressed people create the conditions and events that lead to and comprise war and terror. A booming economy does not create ebullient people; ebullient people produce more, consume more and participate in and contribute to market manias.

2. Social mood is itself the product of the interaction of the society's members. Collective mentation -- herding -- arises from the interaction of the players in a process similar to the emergent behavior of other complex, non-linear systems. Prechter quotes philosopher Eric Hoffer: When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

3. Social mood fluctuates between polarities of primitive emotional states, such as confidence/fear, skepticism/credulity, optimism/pessimism, benevolence/malevolence, etc. These fluctuations are not effected by outside events, but move according to their own internal logic. They appear to arise in a dynamic that is endogenous to the social system.

4. Social mood fluctuations are patterned by the [Elliott] Wave Principle, a specific sequence of progress and regress that regulates the complex system of collective mood and social interaction. Prechter cites the work of market analyst R.N. Elliott, who, in the 1930's, discovered the patterns in the markets that bear his name. These patterns -- Elliott waves -- are measurable and may be charted.

5. Elliott waves, which are typically used to chart and forecast the movement of stock market valuations, are self-similar at different degrees of scale; i.e. a monthly chart of the Dow looks a lot like a weekly chart, or a 5-minute chart...or a 5-decade chart. Elliott apparently discovered that the market movements are fractal, decades before Mandelbrot invented the term and took credit for that observation.

6. The specific patterns described by Elliott Waves are in close relation to the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. The Fibonacci sequence, and the Fibonacci ratio derived from it, appear ubiquitously in natural forms ranging from the geometry of the DNA molecule to the physiology of plants and animals.

7. The behavior of these fractal, Fibonacci-based waves is specific and patterned. Hence, it is (probabilistically) possible to predict human social behavior.

Given the emphasis placed upon it, it's probably not too gross a distortion to define socionomics as the science of social mood: its genesis, behavior, and effects.

Justification

Any one of the propositions above is controversial; taken together they an extraordinarily claim. In the first volume of the set, Prechter attempts to provide extraordinary evidence to support his claims, and he makes a strong case.

HSB surveys the evidence of fractals and Fibonacci in nature and finance. Prechter sites study after study that finds the Fibonacci sequence in phyllotaxis, in branching or arboral systems, in nautilus shells, pine cones, the DNA molecule, neurons and galaxies ... and in the Dow, Nasdaq, and other market indices. The implication is clear: human social activities are a natural process, no less than the growth of trees or the formation of solar systems. For some readers, this tour-de-force alone may be worth the price of the book.

Prechter then leans heavily on Paul MacLean's book, The Triune Brain in Evolution to explain his endogenous herding impulse. MacLean and others have found evidence that the pre-reasoning limbic system may be hard-wired to herd or flock. The reasoning neocortex may override the impulsive, emotional limbic system if given sufficient time -- and in this possibility lies our experience of free will. But the emotional limbic system is faster and more powerful than the reasoning neocortex, and often wins out. As Prechter puts it: If you doubt its power and speed, try to envision how you would react if someone suddenly dumped a dozen writhing three-foot blacksnakes in your lap. Understanding that they are harmless, try to decide how long it would take you nevertheless to train yourself not to budge upon being surprised that way in the future.

Building on this theoretical base, HSB goes on to develop detailed statements about socionomics proper, statements that Prechter identifies as observations, not yet a hypothesis. He categorizes various social polarities that seem to characterize all social interaction. He traces -- measures -- the ebb and flow between these polarities with various social meters, including popular culture (movies, fashion, music, sports) and, of course, the stock market. For one example, there is a chart of baseball stadium attendance figures in the U.S. that sports a clearly developed Elliott Wave pattern. Based on the pattern, Prechter predicted that baseball's popularity would wain, as it subsequently has.

Application

Pioneering Studies in Socionomics continues this analysis of contemporary trends and events as seen through a socionomic lens. Here's a short list of grist for the socionomic mill: restaurants, Broadway, religion, central-banks (e.g. the Federal Reserve System), Pro Wrestling and the Bull Market, Microsoft, the attacks of 9/11, macroeconomics, and song lyrics. All of these human endeavors are found to fluctuate over time, in the now familiar fractal, Fibonacci-based Elliott waves.

Many Slashdot readers will be amused/intrigued/outraged by the chapter on quantum physics, and its parallel to the social sciences. Here Prechter sites the work (published and unpublished) of physicist Lewis E. Little. Little's thesis challenges the conventional view of quantum mechanics and presents a new theory that places activity at the sub-atomic level on the same grounds of cause and effect as all other physics. There's enough controversy in this chapter alone to merit a separate book!

What's Missing?

As sprawling as these books are, there is no discussion of methodology, seemingly a critical lacuna in the founding of a new science. In the hard sciences there is today little discussion of methodology; the discussion has concluded. In the soft or social sciences, entirely libraries could be filled with the debates on proper methodology. Which subjects should be chosen for research, and how should they be chosen? How should experiments be conducted? Or is experimentation possible? Or even desirable? Is the use of mathematics appropriate? If so, how?

Answers to these questions, which Prechter may provide in due time, are needed to defend what's proposed. For example, an easy criticism to make of the various essays in PSS is that the subject matter is cherry-picked, and that choosing different subjects may have yielded different results. The particular criticism may or may not be valid; it will take a methodological argument to answer.

A Closing Analogy

James Gleick's Chaos tells the story of the scientists and researchers who founded a new science. Over and over, they tell a similar story: that chaotic behavior was ever-present in the physical world, but dismissed as noise in the experiment. It required a profound shift in perspective to realize that the noise was worth studying.

Is Prechter, with his Fibonacci-based fractal waves of human social behavior and socionomic insight, correctly pointing out a similar need for a profound shift in perspective? Is the noise of pre-rational human social behavior worth studying? Does our future lie in our reasoning mind, or our prehistoric brain?

Some Useful Links

• The web site of the Socionomics Institute
  
• An overview of socionomics by John Casti, of the Santa Fe Institute.

You can purchase Socionomics: the Science of History and Social Prediction from bn.com -- the official release date is September 23rd. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

morgothan writes "As reported in an article on Math World the solution, or rather lack of solution has been found to the over one hundred fifty year old math problem of how many numbers of magic tours a knight can make on a standard 8x8 chessboard. It turn out that there exist one hundred forty distinct semimagic tours, but no magic tour. The solution came after 61.40 CPU-days, corresponding to 138.25 days of computation at 1 GHz, the project was completed on August 5, 2003 in which every possible enumeration was tried out. The author of the software that finally solved the problem has also put up a webpage in which he further explains the problem and his method of solving it." Thanks to Mig for pointing out a great background page on Chessbase.com.

morgothan writes "As reported in an article on Math World the solution, or rather lack of solution has been found to the over one hundred fifty year old math problem of how many numbers of magic tours a knight can make on a standard 8x8 chessboard. It turn out that there exist one hundred forty distinct semimagic tours, but no magic tour. The solution came after 61.40 CPU-days, corresponding to 138.25 days of computation at 1 GHz, the project was completed on August 5, 2003 in which every possible enumeration was tried out. The author of the software that finally solved the problem has also put up a webpage in which he further explains the problem and his method of solving it." Thanks to Mig for pointing out a great background page on Chessbase.com.

morgothan writes "As reported in an article on Math World the solution, or rather lack of solution has been found to the over one hundred fifty year old math problem of how many numbers of magic tours a knight can make on a standard 8x8 chessboard. It turn out that there exist one hundred forty distinct semimagic tours, but no magic tour. The solution came after 61.40 CPU-days, corresponding to 138.25 days of computation at 1 GHz, the project was completed on August 5, 2003 in which every possible enumeration was tried out. The author of the software that finally solved the problem has also put up a webpage in which he further explains the problem and his method of solving it." Thanks to Mig for pointing out a great background page on Chessbase.com.

Stephen Wolfram, subject of much discussion here, once known solely as the creator of Mathematica, now also known as the author of A New Kind of Science (/. review here), gave a lecture at Boston University this past spring on that book's subject matter. The audio of the lecture was broadcast this evening on the program World of Ideas on WBUR-FM out of Boston. If you don't live in the Boston area, if you missed the program, or if like me you were listening in your car while driving and found that two activites incompatible, the hour-long recording is also available for download in RealMedia format.

Dr. Zowie writes "Perl Data Language 2.4.0 was just released; get it here. This release includes even more powerful array slicing, a complete GIS cartography package, API access to the Gnu Scientific Library, and a host of other goodies. Between PDL and its less-mature siblings Numeric Python and Octave, the established commercial languages' days appear numbered."

Flamerule writes "The New York Times is now reporting that Dr. Grigori (Grisha) Perelman, of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, appears to have solved the famous Poincaré Conjecture, one of the Clay Institute's million-dollar Millennium Prize problems. I first noticed a short blurb about this at the MathWorld homepage last week, but Google searches have revealed almost nothing but the date and times of some of his lectures this month, including a packed session at MIT (photos), in which he reportedly presented material that proves the Conjecture. More specifically, the relevant material comes from a paper ("The entropy formula for the Ricci flow and its geometric applications") from last November, and a follow-up that was just released last month."

Flamerule writes "The New York Times is now reporting that Dr. Grigori (Grisha) Perelman, of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, appears to have solved the famous Poincaré Conjecture, one of the Clay Institute's million-dollar Millennium Prize problems. I first noticed a short blurb about this at the MathWorld homepage last week, but Google searches have revealed almost nothing but the date and times of some of his lectures this month, including a packed session at MIT (photos), in which he reportedly presented material that proves the Conjecture. More specifically, the relevant material comes from a paper ("The entropy formula for the Ricci flow and its geometric applications") from last November, and a follow-up that was just released last month."

Ed Pegg Jr writes "You may know of the importance of 299792458 for length, and 9192631770 for time. However, the official standard for weight is still a block of platinum/iridium made a hundred years ago. A group of scientists from the Avogadro Project are hoping to change that, though, by producing a perfect sphere of ultrapure silicon."

Ed Pegg Jr writes "You may know of the importance of 299792458 for length, and 9192631770 for time. However, the official standard for weight is still a block of platinum/iridium made a hundred years ago. A group of scientists from the Avogadro Project are hoping to change that, though, by producing a perfect sphere of ultrapure silicon."

CEHT asks: "As a research programmer at the university, I have encountered numerous times when I need to choose which language(s) or package(s) to use for different projects. Tradeoffs and performance issues have to be considered: results from one package may be more compatible with the data from other researchers, another package may find the solution faster and use less resources, and so forth. Maple, Matlab, Magma, and Mathematica are among the most well-known packages. Libraries such as IMSL is also popular. Of course, there are smaller (and mostly free) packages that tend to target specific types of problem, such as LiDIA, Singular, and LAPACK. The question is, how useful are these [and other] math packages? Do researchers use only one or two packages for most of their projects? Or do people like to mix things a little by pulling the strength of different packages together to solve a math problem? If not, do researchers write C/C++ programs and use GMP or Matpack to solve math problems?"

Ninnux asks: "I wanted to find out from the community which was the better mathametics modeling package: Mathematica or Matlab. The cancer center I research and program for is considering purchasing a license set. I'll be working with Bayesian machine learning and other bioinformatic approaches for hormone pathway modeling. I know Matlab has various toolboxes that would be rather useful, but I'd like to hear what people think." While I'm sure direct comparisons will be made, I think focusing on the specific niche will help Ninnux the most; so, how well does each piece of software handle Bayesian functions and other bioinformatic computations?

simpl3x writes "Mathematica for grids was announced at Comdex. It offers support for the usual platforms--Windows, OS X, Linux, and Unix--and offers the ability to use heterogeneous OSes. I haven't used the product in years, but cool nonetheless. Does an off-the-shelf software package, which is scalable as this is provide competition to custom packages--is it easier to add machines than develop custom programs?" And just when you thought Comdex was good and dead.

hesheboy writes "Wolfram.com has a story about building a battlebot with Mathematica: 'October 28, 2002--Looking for action with brains-over-brawn appeal? William McHargue, a freelance physicist and long-time Mathematica user, is one of many who find this combination in BattleBots, the new fighting-robot craze. "With BattleBots, one can be aggressive and yet nobody gets hurt," says McHargue. Recently, McHargue was featured in Mechanical Engineering magazine for work on Tesla's Tornado, his BattleBot.'"

Slashback's updates tonight (below) bring you more information on chemically interesting furniture, old-school electronics in new-tech devices, and Brigham Young's ultra-strong building materials. Welcome to the home, car and wind-farm of the future, please mind your step.

Bratty kids get to sit near the volatile elements. Theodore Gray writes: "About a month ago there was a slashdot lively discussion about my wooden Periodic Table Table. A bunch of slashdot readers sent me elements for it: Thank you slashdot! Two people actually sent me free Ag and Pd, contrary to the jokes in the discussion. I decided the world could stand another periodic table website. Since all the eight dozen other periodic tables on the web have better reference information than mine, I used some Mathematica programs to generate links to many of them for each element. But my site is more beautiful. I'm going for science as art. Mine also has by far the best quality sample photos: High resolution, high quality macro shots of 89 samples so far."

Starts with a crank, too. ripaway writes "With all the recent stories about vaccuum tubes, I find it ironic that I stumbled on this today. Sterephile reports about the Panasonic CQ-TX5500D(link to Japanese site) car stereo that uses a vaccuum tube, with analog vu-meters. It also plays mp3 files 8-) Naturally, this is for the Japan market only."

Sounds like material for a Burning Man tent ... nm1m writes "A superstrong composite developed by Brigham Young University scientists and students has received financing for its first practical application -- mammoth wind turbine towers able to more than triple the electrical output of existing steel models. Read the story here."

We mentioned this interesting lattice-looking material a few weeks ago.

Sucking requires a context to be good or bad. Sun Tzu writes "After the recent discussion on bad software, how about a different reason for why software sucks? Maybe we programmers and users don't have it quite so bad after all."

That dadburn whippersnapper, why when I was a boy ... Junks Jerzey writes "I remember reading about Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers five years ago in Wired News. Pretty cool stuff, with an introduction by some guy called John Romero. It was available for a long time as a commercial product that used HTML for formatting, but it's now completely online, as reported by the author."

serendigital writes "Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research and creator of Mathematica has, after 10 years+ finished his book, "A New Kind of Science." In a "Wired" article entitled: The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything ...," Steven Levy talks about how and why the book was written and more importantly, what it is about. The best part of the article is in this exchange: 'I've got to ask you,' I say. 'How long do you envision this rule of the universe to be?' ... 'I don't know. In Mathematica, for example, perhaps three, four lines of code.'" This book seems a little... nutty. But it's been submitted a bunch of times. If anyone wants to review it, go right ahead.

serendigital writes "Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research and creator of Mathematica has, after 10 years+ finished his book, "A New Kind of Science." In a "Wired" article entitled: The Man Who Cracked The Code to Everything ...," Steven Levy talks about how and why the book was written and more importantly, what it is about. The best part of the article is in this exchange: 'I've got to ask you,' I say. 'How long do you envision this rule of the universe to be?' ... 'I don't know. In Mathematica, for example, perhaps three, four lines of code.'" This book seems a little... nutty. But it's been submitted a bunch of times. If anyone wants to review it, go right ahead.

Martin Dunwoody, a famous mathematician who works in the field of topology has a preprint that provides a proof of the Poincaré conjecture. This was one of the seven Clay Mathematics Institute millenium prize problems (reported on Slashdot here). The solution to each of the problems carries a monetary reward of 1 million dollars. However there are a number of conditions that still need to be met for the prize to be awarded in the case of the Poincaré conjecture.

slander writes "I have in my shelves a secondhand, bent-folded-stapled-and-mutilated copy of "Numerical Recipies". Thinking I could do better, I googled a little to find Numerical Recipies in the Universal Library. A very neat nerdy resource indeed. Slashdot's attention was drawn by a re-release of MathWorld in Nov 2001. What other dead-tree classics are hiding out there?"

Many readers (like this Anonymous Coward) have written with the good news that "Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics, a free, online encyclopedia of mathematics was taken off the web thanks to a lawsuit by CRC Publishing. After much legal wrangling, it returns today stronger than ever. See it rise from the ashes at http://mathworld.wolfram.com."

HomeySmurf asks: "I am wondering if anyone is interested in a free mathematical reference document in hypertext similar to the now unavailable Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics (Slashdot article about its demise here). I know that the body of this work was by Eric Weisstein, but the information itself is fundamentally open, and it is a horrible shame that there is not another similar document project in mathematics. Or at least I haven't been able to find one. Many of the math world submissions and corrections were by various knowledgeable individuals, much like an open source project. I know there is a GPL-like license for documentation, and that it could really come into use here. I would certainly like to be involved in such a project, and there are many different directions this could take." I remember reading about Mathworld when we talked about its demise. It would be interesting to see if a group of people could come up with something similar. Any volunteers?

Jon Wild writes: "Eric Weisstein's online encyclopedia of mathematics, originally located at http://www.treasure-troves.com among Eric's other encyclopedias, and most recently hosted by Wolfram Research, has for some time been the most complete and reliable mathematical resource on the web. Now Wolfram has yanked it due to a lawsuit by CRC Press, the publishers of a print edition of the encyclopedia. See the announcement at http://mathworld.wolfram.com."

P.J. Hinton writes: "The News-Gazette, a newspaper in Champaign, IL, ran a feature in their Sunday edition about the founder of Project Gutenberg. Besides offering descriptions of his unusual eating habits, it gives an insight into the projects foundations almost thirty years ago and notes some criticism that he's received for his work. Defintiely a good read and a reminder that long before CDA, RIAA, MPAA, DMCA, and the USPTO, there were other entities all too willing to block access to information. "

Caseman writes, "Are you a closet mathematician who wants to come out? British publisher Tony Faber is offering a cool million bucks to the first would-be math head to prove the infamous Goldbach conjecture. Yeah, the one about every even number being the sum of two primes. Impossible, you say? Remember Fermat's Last Theorem? It stood unproven for 350 years until a recent effort yielded a proof. Read The London Times article about the challenge. "

P.J. Hinton writes "Newt Gingrich, of all people, is made some interesting remarks at the Internet Commerce Expo. He warned attendees to keep an eye on government efforts to regulate the net, exhorting them to keep the politicians and the press educated so that we don't have the "ignorant creating the impossible." He also drove home the need for high speed access in the home. His remark, "to have every home in America have a T1 line," is something that sounds good to me ;-). " No, not every home. Even just my home would be fine.

P.J. Hinton wrote in to send us a link to a CERT advisory explaining that the sources to TCP wrappers were actually replaced with a nice new and improved version. Complete with a trojan. It was caught fairly quickly after it was uploaded, but it's still kinda scary. Update: 01/22 01:07 by CT : Several people sent the Bugtraq post over at Linux Today. A lot more details clarifying the situation.

P.J. Hinton writes "Performance Computing has posted their first installment of a regular column on Linux called Penguin's Brew. It's being written by the venerable Jon maddog Hall. The first column is just the basics about what Linux is. It's a bookmarker for those of you who need to point someone to an article about what Linux is all about. "

P.J. Hinton writes "CMP columnist Fred Langa is in the process of giving Linux a test drive and is opening up his threads page to people who are willing to give installation guidance and input. This would be a good chance for Linux advocates to stop flaming Windows and start helping him to see where Linux can do wonders. "

P.J. Hinton writes "The July 2 Unix Riot column at Performance Computing (the periodical formerly known as Unix Review) includes a blurb about Tcl inventor John Ousterhout going commercial with a company by the name of Scriptics. Their main product will be a Tcl/tk development environment called TclPro. The company's website says that the product is in beta. " I'm glad to see that the folks that created all this cool stuff are going to be able to get something in return...

P.J. Hinton wrote in to tell us that John Dodge has collapsed under the tidal wave of email from Linux Users in response to his column from few weeks ago. He's decided to throw Linux on an older box and try it out so he can speak more fairly in future columns. I for one am glad to hear it.