A compendium of interviews, commentaries, lore, homepages, etc. about the world of mathematics and its residents.

Interviews

• Persi Diaconis interviewed by David Aldous.
• Ed Thorp on Tim Ferriss, parts one and two
• K.R. Parthasarathy in Bhāvanā
• S.R.S. Varadhan interview (and don’t forgot the review of Strook and Varadhan, Multidimensional diffusion processes by David Williams).

Homepages and Accounts

• William Feller article on this site
• David Aldous’s site
• Persi Diaconis’s site
• Ed Thorp’s site
• Dave Bayer’s site and Hacker News account syzygies
• graycat
• Steven Finch, man of curiosity. Paper and paper
• Stephen Stigler with work and pictures on the history of statistics.
• Nick Higham on applied math and numerical linear algebra, many good posts
• Graduate Descent by Tim Viera
  • Gumbel-max trick
• Bohemian Matrices
• Sebastian Pokutta, optimization, Frank-Wolfe / conditional gradient.
• Greg Egan, lay mathematician and science fiction writer.
• John Baez
• Richard E Borcherds on YouTube including a very nice series on complex analysis.
  • Borcherds’s heuristic to check whether a complex analysis textbook is good enough to use: does it have sections on the Gamma function and on elliptic functions? If so, then go ahead. If not, you will miss out on all the fun of complex analysis. Lars Ahlfors, Complex Analysis is one such “good” book.

Books

• Luenberger, Optimization by vector space methods. A lauded classic.