I’ve not been keeping up with blogging this semester, but I had to share this beautiful spam comment my filter let through this morning:

Appreciation for the excellent writeup. This in reality was previously your fun profile it. Glimpse complex to help way presented reasonable on your part! On the other hand, the way could possibly we be in contact?

I can’t tell if it’s written by a non-native English speaker or by a Markov chain—does that mean it passes the Turing test? Either way, there’s something lovely about its broken grammar.

The author’s name was given as “buy inversion tables.” For a moment I thought this might be a real comment, by someone offering to compute large matrix inversions cheaply and quickly. But no, apparently inversion tables are these things where you strap yourself in, flip over, and hang upside down for as long as you can. Kind of like the first semester of a PhD program 🙂

PS—somehow the comment reminds me of when Cosma Shalizi’s students used Markov-chain generated text to fake a blog post for him, in a previous iteration of the Statistical Computing class (which I’m TA’ing this term).

Earlier this week, Argentina hosted the 53rd International Math Olympiad (IMO), a mathematical problem-solving contest for high school students from all over the world. That means it’s almost time for another “mini-polymath” project!

Edit: As of Friday morning (7/13/2012), the problem still has not been completely solved, so there’s time to chime in on the discussion thread!

For the past few years, mathematician Terry Tao has hosted and coordinated a social problem-solving event, where people around the world use a blog and wiki to work together on one of that year’s IMO problems. His 2009 post is a good introduction to the event and the spirit behind it. Personally, I had a blast trying to contribute (if only a tiny bit) to the 2010 event.

Tao will be hosting a fourth “mini-polymath” tonight (July 12, 2012), starting at UTC 22:00, which is 6pm EST for us here on the US East Coast. If you read blogs like mine, I imagine you’d enjoy participating, or at least following along and watching the mathematical ideas going off like fireworks 🙂

Continue reading “Polymath project: social problem-solving” →