James Tauber's Blog 2007/08/12
Math Doesn't Suck
Speaking of Numbers...
A few years ago I was on a flight from Boston to LA when I saw Danica McKellar (Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years) sitting in business class. I later looked up IMDb to see what she'd been up to and discovered she'd graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with a BS in mathematics.
Furthermore while there, she published a paper that got her a finite Erdős number, making her one of the few people that has both a finite Erdős number (hers is 4) and finite Bacon number (just 2 in her case). (See Wikipedia's Erdos-Bacon number article for a list of other people with both.)
For a while, Danica's had a feature on her website where she answers maths questions posed by fans.
Then, earlier this month, she published a book entitled Math Doesn't Suck : How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail. I'm clearly not the target audience but if I had a daughter, she could do a lot worse than have Danica McKellar as a role-model.
Way to go Danica!
by James Tauber : Created on Aug. 12, 2007 : Last modified Aug. 12, 2007 : Categories mathematics : 1 comment (permalink)
Installing iWork '08
I just got back to Boston from San Francisco (had a great dinner and chat with Graham Glass last night) and my copy of iWork '08 had arrived.
I'm looking forward to trying out Numbers as I've been eagerly anticipating it for close to two years (I was disappointed '06 didn't have it).
From what I've seen online, I suspect Numbers won't be suitable for some people's high-end number-crunching but for the everyday spreadsheet work I do, it looks like a dramatically better approach than the mainstream spreadsheets of the past.
It will be interesting to see what the "more word processor than page layout" additions to Pages are like as well.
by James Tauber : Created on Aug. 12, 2007 : Last modified Aug. 12, 2007 : Categories apple : 2 comments (permalink)