bigideas

Two-culture-uniting organisation Edge has been posing a simple question every two years since 1998 and receiving answers and comments from a battery of eminent people. Of course, the real fun is coming up with your own answers.

Today German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen died at the age of 79. In a half-century of revisionism in the classical music world, Stockhausen remained a joyful experimenter in sound whose infectious excitement seemed to make accessible the most superficially “difficult” of music.

I just stumbled upon one of the numerous online implementations of Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, and realised that there are certain writers whose work I put to use in much the way that some people use those (relatively) famous cards.

In this instalment of our topological mini-series, we look at how the idea of a quotient map can create a number of familiar and unfamiliar surfaces from nothing more than a simple patch of the plane. Besides offering a little light relief, these surfaces and their relatives will be important to us later.

I’ve been meaning to post an explanation of the irrationality of the square root of 2 for a while, but Meep has just done it in the seventh of her series Meep’s Math Matters. But what is an irrational number? Do they really exist?

Quite a few blogs have picked up on “news” that a philosophy degree may not make you unemployable, suggesting that — phew — it might not be a “worthless” qualification after all. But what is the value of a philosophy education, and how is it perceived in the commercial job market?

After reading a lot of unpleasant BNP material for the previous post, I needed some light relief. Long-standing readers will know we like a good optical illusion, and it turns out that an excellent example in the duck-rabbit mould is currently doing the rounds.

So, today holocaust denier David Irving and leader of the far-right British National Party Nick Griffin are to address the Oxford Union, causing the media and the blogosphere to pick up the free speech debate right where the fuss over James Watson‘s remark last month left off.

In the previous couple of instalments we’ve looked at ways to make new topological spaces out of existing ones. This one is no different, except arguably the spaces that emerge from quotient maps, which we’ll introduce here, are among the more important in topology.

There’s a general preference for theories to be neat, clean and simple. The problem is, fundamentally, that the world isn’t any of those things. Cliffshill outlines a claim that simplicity makes a physical theory less, not more, likely to be true.