Historian and former British Library curator here. Of all the mutton-brained decisions taken by universities in relation to libraries, @mit.edu offers an example of the worst: CLOSING LIBRARIES. 1/ 💙📚 🧪🗃 #academicsky fnl.mit.edu/may-june-202...

Name your fav Steven King novel.

Hello. Does anybody have access to the *cover* of the New York Times Book Review for April 15, 2001 ("Vandals in the stacks!")? Could you please post or send me a picture or pdf of it? The best I can find is the microscopic image here: archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.... Thanks!

I'm sure I wasn't the only kid with weird reading habits who found Desmond Morris's work in secondhand bookstores. As an adult, his collaborative 1979 book on Gesture in Western & Southern Europe has been something I've returned to frequently in my research. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Hot off the presses! Some people think I'm a stereotype of a nerd 🤓, but isn't that kind of a cliché? Let's talk about how "stereotype" & "cliché" were invented by the printing press. Movable type depended on typesetters putting little letter blocks (a 'sort' or 'type') in 'forms'.

Math at Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg has long had an interest in mathematics, perhaps because of its timelessness. This interest has been expressed in many ways, though perhaps some of them were misguided in retrospect. www.gutenberg.org/newsletter/ #ebooks #publicdomain

I just found out logician John Addison passed last year. See a short In Memoriam on p. 3: math.berkeley.edu/sites/defaul...

@lightningcolors.bsky.social : youtu.be/BrJv_wUEKko?...

A history of typos will soon go on display at Yale: "With this exhibition, we wanted to share ways in which even small corrections can reshape meaning and authority." www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/t...

This is very timely. I've been lately thinking about what I call the ephemera of mathematical research. All those bits of knowledge we collect informally and easily get lost. A tiny bit more: mathstodon.xyz/@AndresCaice...

I subscribed a bit late, so they arrived only now. mspmag.com/arts-and-cul...

retractionwatch.com/2025/04/07/m... The latest issue of MLQ (Vol 71, no. 4) consists so far of a paper in analysis on time scales, and no logic. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15213870...

The sentencing trial for Yoon Suk-yeol will begin in 10 minutes.

2026 basically

I collect bookmarks (it is a tiny collection so far. If you have some extras, don't hesitate to send them to me). World Bookmark Day (#WOBODA) 2026 is February 25. To celebrate, I figured I would post bookmarks each day leading to the 25th. Today: Berkeley Reads (two bookmarks, front and back)

dying to know the story behind the one photo wikipedia has of this mathematician. why was he taking a swim

RIP Cecilia Giménez. An artist for our times. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

HipÓtesis, a periodical of the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, published a special issue devoted to mathematics. I have a short paper there (Un teorema de Ramsey para los enteros). hipotesis.uniandes.edu.co/ediciones/ed... doi.org/10.71590/1992-77381

Forgot to link to the book: cs.smith.edu/~jorourke/Ma... #MathSky #Mathematics #Origami 🧪

Eleven years ago, I wrote to Tom Stoppard to ask about this coup de théâtre from 1949. It took me down an unexpected rabbit hole - in memory of Stoppard, here's what I found.

Hope someone can help me? The copy I have access to of volume 4 No. 1 (1980) of "AEB. Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography" is missing pp. 14 and 79. This appears to be a problem with that specific copy, since I have not found a reported erratum (or the missing page printed) in later volumes. 1/

“Apuntamientos de otorgrafia”. Typo in the Spanish word for correct spelling (ortografia) in this early C18 publisher’s ad.

A paper on Martin Davis's work has just been published in "Philosophia Mathematica": Martin Davis: An Overview of his Work in Logic, Computer Science, and Philosophy By L De Mol, Y V Matiyasevich, E G Omodeo, A Policriti, W Sieg and E J Weyuker. doi.org/10.1093/phil...

Excitingly, Today's the opening day of MathsWorld, the new hands-on maths museum in London. I've really enjoyed visiting MathsCity in Leeds, but they've now got a London location too! Details at mathsworld.com

"New Far Side comics" was definitely not on my bingo card for this week. They're not bad! www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/

If anyone here has access to the "Journal of the Early Book Society", I would be most grateful if you could send me "The Scribal Transmission of Northern Dialect in the Reeve’s Tale" by Thomas J. Farrell, pp. 75-110 in Vol 25 (2022). I do not currently have access to interlibrary loan. (Thanks!)

Anybody here with access to the Times Literary Supplement? There is an article from last year I would like to read.

If anybody with access to "American Literary Manuscripts : An Essay Review" by John C Broderick (Resources for American Literary Study (1976) 6 (1): 85–95) could share the review with me, I would be most grateful.

Hoping someone can help me here: what would be a library or online resource (or other options) where I could find some of the publications of the (long defunct) Center for Editions of American Authors? Particularly their Newsletter, their reply to E. Wilson, their Statement of editorial principles.

I have an amazing opportunity Sept. 15-19. I'll be at the Santa Fe Institute with a dozen invited humanists and scientists discussing this topic: "How do we reconcile traditional humanistic inquiry with mathematical modeling approaches that are reshaping knowledge production?" 1/5

Reposted from Mathstodon, because I am still interested: In "Cantar de Mio Cid", the infantes de Carrión, married to the Cid's daughters, decide to repudiate them, take them to an isolated area, beat them within an inch of their lives, and abandon them. (Cont.)

truly makes you think

I firmly believe that buying books and reading books are two distinctly separate hobbies.

At Math Reviews we started recently an experiment of sorts: an Editors colloquium, a series of short, sporadic talks where we discuss some aspect of our research to our colleagues (who are also mathematicians, but in different areas). 1/2

It's good that Venn diagrams are trending because it gives me an excuse to repost one I made (hallelujah!)

Why does English say “eleven” and “twelve” instead of *oneteen and *twoteen? 🧵 1/9

four. different. ampersands. !!!! & they all illustrate the origin of the ampersand in the ligature of the latin conjunction “et” (“and”). 222050 • @folger.edu

Exciting and practical house designs coming out of Scandinavia

#oer #medievalsky #chaucer #oa Plese repost: "THE OPEN ACCESS COMPANION TO THE CANTERBURY TALES, a free, scholar-produced resource for teaching and studying *The Canterbury Tales* at the University Level is at a NEW address: opencanterburytales dot lsusites dot org" opencanterburytales.lsusites.org

@gizem-karaali.bsky.social Happy birthday, dear Gizem! 🥳

The cardinals are dying https://www.wikiart.org/en/max-ernst/the-cardinals-are-dying-1962

Spotted in Logan Circle

You're seeing a hypothesis being tested: Terry Hunt & Carl Lipo (anthropology faculty at U of Hawai'i) investigated oral legends that Easter Island Moai statues "walked" from the quarry to their locations by the sea, where they stare into the island, signifying the spirit of ancestors & leaders.