Re: Publicity

["Fred E.J. Linton" <fejlinton@usa.net>]

On Thu, 06 Jun 2013 09:26:15 AM EDT Ross Street <ross.street@mq.edu.au>
wrote:

>
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350567/description/One_of_the_most_abstract_fields_in_math_finds_application_in_the_real_world
> 
> Perhaps the above article is more good than harm.

Over the years, author Julie Rehmeyer has given birth to quite a litter,

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/authored/id/43/name/Julie_Rehmeyer ,

of mathematically literate news articles, including, for example, a report
on the claim of "Vinay Deolalikar, a computer scientist at Hewlett Packard 
labs in India, [who] sent an email on August 7 [of the year 2010] to a few 
top researchers claiming that P doesn’t equal NP" -- cf.:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/63252/description/Crowdsourcing_peer_review

The piece you point to strikes me as quite reasonable, actually, apart from 
the two pairs of paragraphs reporting on the ... umm ... thinking (?) of
Messrs. Harper and Spivak, which strike me as being probably accurate
depictions of their own cockeyed cocktail-party gibberish.

[But then, what do I know? I'm just a retiree from tiny little Wesleyan, 
after all, not an active respected member of Carnegie Mellon or MIT :-) .]

But all the rest is about as close to the mark as a discussion pitched 
to the interested and sympathetic layperson can possibly be.

Cheers, and thanks for pointing that piece out, -- Fred



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