I went to a home improvement store to get some roller blinds cut. I needed these to be cut to exact measurements, because I have trouble sleeping. I bring the blinds to where the machine is and press the button. I note that the blade on this thing is just held on by a screw clamp to a piece of metal marked out like a ruler, so I could get any length I requested. Well, this girl shows up and tries to tell me that <i>the machine doesn't do fractions</i>. WTF? Is our math education so bad that we have people in the workforce who don't want to deal with 5/16ths?
Timothy Gowers does some pretty cool research, anything that cross fertilizes analysis and combinatorics is pretty awesome.<p>For the two problems in the talk regarding sequences of prime numbers, I suggest folks check out the green tao theorem : <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green-Tao_theorem" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green-Tao_theorem</a>
He put it in a way that was interesting. That even if individual mathematicians weren't motivated by practicality and more by interestingness, as a whole, mathematics is richer because of it, and will be a more complete body of knowledge to be able to address future practical problems.
i find this one : <a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Hamming.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Hamming.htm...</a> to be quite nice too.