Finals awareness month

Ok, it’s not that. But many students across the US are aware of finals. So are many mathematicians, those in academia who are teaching….

One way that math and science and other fields have changed with the advent of the internet is the coalescence of the blogging community. There are academics from many fields blogging, some about more personal things, some about academic culture, some about their areas of research. An anonymous cross-cultural conversation is possible: you can read economists and ?? (social scientist!) talk about grading sanity strategies, you can amuse yourself with a physical scientist liveblogging her own exam, you can read about writing papers with grad students who don’t want to write papers from another physical scientist.

If you want to stick closer to math, you can read about the end-of semester crunch at PhD+epsilon. I think we all know what that’s like. I’d add my own lessons here except I’m at a conference and I need to do math! It surprises me a bit that there is not as much math culture discussion as there is, say, medical research discussion. One good place to find some mixed math and cultural insight and an extensive blogroll is at the Accidental Mathematician. I appreciate the recent cultural discussions. Another place to find a broad range of interesting links is the Blog on Math Blogs. Notice that two of the blogs in this paragraph are sponsored by the AMS: I am glad to see the AMS taking an active role in outreach via the internet.

What academic blogs do you read and what benefit do they bring to your life, if any?