Science at Collins

• Melzak, ZA. 2007. Companion to concrete mathematics. Dover ed. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications.
• Mrowka, Tomasz, and Peter Steven Ozsváth, eds. 2009. Low dimensional topology. Providence, R.I. Princeton, N.J.: American Mathematical Society ; Institute for Advanced Study.

• Box, George E. P., J. Stuart Hunter, and William Gordon Hunter, eds. 2005. Statistics for experimenters : Design, innovation, and discovery. 2nd ed. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Interscience.
• Deibert, Ronald, ed. 2008. Access denied : The practice and policy of global internet filtering. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Duda, Richard O., Peter E. Hart, and David G. Stork, eds. 2001. Pattern classification. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley.
• Funk, Tom. 2009. Web 2.0 and beyond : Understanding the new online business models, trends, and technologies. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.
• Gentle, James E. 2007. Matrix algebra : Theory, computations, and applications in statistics. New York, N.Y. ; London: Springer.
  Lefebvre, Mario. 2006. Applied probability and statistics. New York: Springer.
• Rudas, Tamás, ed. 2008. Handbook of probability : Theory and applications. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
• Weyl, Hermann. 2009. Philosophy of mathematics and natural science. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

WolframAlpha is out and worth trying out today. It’s hard to tell whether its future will live up to its claims, but it’s certainly fascinating. (And certainly programmed with a sense of humor. Click the image at left).

It’s tricky to get used to, since it’s not a fancier Google. It won’t find references to concepts or ideas, or pull back articles or web sites, and it chokes up on excess verbiage.

What it will do is pull back data and perform some analyses. (You might be clued in quicker than me by the little orange = in the search box).

So, no, I can’t find out everything out there about Tacoma—but I can find out what the weather was like in 1980—or any year back to 1939. Or the per capita income.

Additionally, since WolframAlpha uses Mathematica technology, mathematical questions are a strong point. Enter a formula to see it plotted out and presented in alternative representations.

Note the link at the bottom for sources of information when a question involves data. It’s explicitly not a citation explaining the data’s provenance, but it helps guide the user toward more information.

WolframAlpha is clearly still in the early stages of development, but it’s very interesting to play around with and definitely worth keeping an eye on.

• Beck, József. 2008. Combinatorial games : Tic-tac-toe theory. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.Dowker, Ann, ed. 2008. Mathematical difficulties : Psychology and intervention. 1st ed. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
• Hardy, GH. 2008. A course of pure mathematics.  New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Kenner, Hugh. 2003. Geodesic math and how to use it.  Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Kung, Joseph P. S., Gian-Carlo Rota, and Catherine H. Yan, eds. 2009. Combinatorics : The rota way. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
• Robson, Eleanor. 2008. Mathematics in ancient Iraq : A social history. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
• Rudman, Peter S. 2007. How mathematics happened : The first 50,000 years. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

• Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of age in second life : An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Pezzè, Mauro, and Michal Young, eds. 2008. Software testing and analysis : Process, principles, and techniques. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.
• Schumann, David W., and Esther Thorson, eds. 2007. Internet advertising : Theory and research. Rev. ed. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

ArXiv just announced a new opt-in service for authors, a public author identifier, that will make it easier to find your work.

What does this mean?

A public author identifier is a unique string of characters that makes it it possible to disambiguate authors from each other (letting you be certain that J. A. Smith is a different author than J. Smith) and to search comprehensively for everything written by an author (letting you be certain you’ve found all of J.A. Smith’s papers, including those signed with different forms of the name, like  J. Smith,  or published under an earlier name, like J. Brown).

Right now, ArXiv uses authority records to link authors together in most of these situations, which helps keep authorship in order. However, it is a strictly in-house system. It can’t communicate easily with other services, unlike the public author identifier.

The public author identifier is a URI, or unique string of characters. It will ultimately be linkable to resources not in ArXiv, so that papers in another database could be found, if not accessed, by an author search in ArXiv. This will make it easier for interested readers to find everything you’ve written, upping exposure and citation possibilities.

What else does it do that’s new?

In addition to making publications more obvious, the public author identifier has a few other nifty advantages.  The public author identifier makes it possible to:

• Enter the URI into a browser and automatically have it resolve it into an HTML web page listing all your ArXive deposited publications, as in this example.
• Follow an author or be followed as an author via RSS feed.
• Automatically and dynamically include a complete list of your publications on your own web page using a widget called myarticle. Once the code is inserted in your page, every time an article of yours is deposited in ArXiv, the list on your web page will be updated with no further effort from you.
• Automatically list your articles on your Facebook profile and comment on or discuss ArXiv articles with other authors using the app myarxiv.

How do I use it?

Contact an ArXiv administrator to opt in if this sounds interesting as an author. Then try out any of the new services, or just rest assured that your publications are easier to find.

As a reader, keep an eye out for others using the system, so you can more efficiently keep track of work!

Stop by Collins Library today or tomorrow morning, where Tibetan monks from the Drepung Loseling monastery are creating a sand mandala, an intricate design painted with sand. Learn more about the tradition of sand painting and its meaning in Tibetan Buddhism.

The mandala begins with geometric chalk drawings which are gradually filled in with more detailed sand painting. Read a bit more about the relationship between geometry and the sacred in  Robert Lawlor’s Sacred Geometry.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women in  technology. Bloggers take a pledge to highlight an influential woman in technology in order to inspire today’s women in technology, and so, today, I’d like to do that.

However, I don’t want to highlight just one woman—I’d like to highlight all of the women who served as human computers over the years.

Most of them labored quietly at math and computing, in fields ranging from astronomy to cryptography, at institutions from Harvard to the WPA, and few of them are identified as having made any individual breakthroughs or are widely remembered by the public. They were regarded as a respectable workers, though rarely as visionaries.

The image of this mass of women whose role in technology was quietly accepted makes me hope that soon we can reach a point where, in a more equal context and with more elbow room for their visions, it is again taken as simply natural for women to work in technology and computing. As someone who’s not planning on shaking any paradigms, but hopes to master the necessary technology to do her work well in an increasingly digital and coded world, I find these women inspiring examples to remember when the world of software and technology looks forbidding for whatever reason.

And since even those who do plan to shake up paradigms and start computing revolutions need to start out somewhere, I hope this image makes the entry a little more welcoming for them.

To learn more about human computers or women in computer science, try:

• Get to Collins Library resources and learn more about current women in science and women in computing.
• Check out Alan Grier’s When Computers Were Human (QA 303.2 .G75 2005 at Collins Library)
  • Since this is such an interdisciplinary topic, mining the bibliography will get you to more related sources faster than a search might.
• Try David Skinner, “The Age of Female Computers,” The New Atlantis, Number 12, Spring 2006, pp. 96-103.
• Or for a taste of period literature, scope out the 1944 “Careers for Girls” in the Mathematical Gazette.

Click the titles of these new arrivals to be taken to the catalog record to find call numbers and availability.

• Bugg, DV. 2006. Electronics : Circuits, amplifiers and gates. 2nd ed. New York: Taylor & Francis.
•  Himma, Kenneth Einar, and Herman T. Tavani, eds. 2008. The handbook of information and computer ethics. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.
• Nocks, Lisa. 2008. The robot : The life story of a technology. Johns Hopkins pbk. ed. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.   [Includes AI]

Click the titles of these new arrivals to be taken to the catalog record to find call numbers and availability.

• Beck, Matthias, and Sinai Robins, eds. 2007. Computing the continuous discretely : Integer-point enumeration in polyhedra. New York: Springer.
• Borwein, Jonathan M., and Adrian S. Lewis, eds. 2006. Convex analysis and nonlinear optimization : Theory and examples. 2nd ed. New York: Springer.
• Flajolet, Philippe, and Robert Sedgewick, eds. 2009. Analytic combinatorics. Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Hardy, G. H. 1947, and Edward Maitland Wright, eds. 2008. An introduction to the theory of numbers. 6th ed. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
• Körner, TW. 2008. Naive decision making : Mathematics applied to the social worldCambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Koshy, Thomas. 2009. Catalan numbers with applications. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
• Stewart, Ian. 2006. How to cut a cake : And other mathematical conundrums. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.