Maths!

My inner nerd just wanted to share a couple of excellent maths websites:

The first, the English site Numberphile, is a collection of humorous little clips dealing with interesting facts about numbers. Each clip is a kind of fun and informal mini-lecture by a mathematician or a physicist, and aimed at the general public.

http://www.numberphile.com/index.html

The second, the American site Khan's Academy, is one of the best things I've ever encountered on the Internet: it is a huge collection of short maths (and science, and a few other things) lessons going from the most basic to about college level. It is a totally free ressource to help students and people who want to teach themselves stuff. Initially, all the videos were made Salman Khan, the founder — who is an excellent and inspiring teacher, the kind of maths teacher I would have loved to encounter in school but sadly never did... An MIT engineering graduate and ex-banker, he gave up his highly lucrative job to set up his educational website. The Academy seems to have grown quite a lot recently and I think it is now supported by Bill Gates' foundation. My brother Oliver stumbled onto it when he went back to school for a maths degree and found that the classes were taught in such a stupid way, he actually needed to teach himself everything on his own — for which he found the website to be a great ressource.

http://www.khanacademy.org/

And while I'm carrying on about maths stuff, why not mention in passing the awesomest maths vulgarization book I've ever read? It is Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann And The Greatest Unsolved Problem In Mathematics, by John Derbyshire, an English conservative pundit working in the financial sector in New York, who happens to have a knack for explaining very deep and complex things in a luminous and elegant prose, so that even an innumerate simpleton like myself can follow.