* Andres Valloud <ten@smallinteger.com> [Jun 13. 2020 12:17]:
Is there *any* popular science publication that has good math articles?
Excellent opportunity to fill the niche: there's no competition.
So, what is the audience that should be targeted? What kind of articles will this audience read? What do they need? What are their interests? Why should they read this hypothetical publication?
People who would enjoy J.\ M.\ Borwein, P.\ B.\ Borwein: {Ramanujan and Pi}, Scientific American 256, pp.~112-117, (1988). Reprinted (pp.~588ff) in Lennart Berggren, Jonathan Borwein, Peter Borwein, (eds.): {Pi: A Source Book} Springer-Verlag, (1997) Example audience: me, in 1988. Who else? People who had a subscription to the Scientific American back then. People interested in what's going on in science, I guess. Note how the "hard stuff" is printed in boxes, using a slightly smaller font than the running text. Why did they not just keep it that way? This, by the way, could have saved the attempt to popularize the "goldbug" paper I mentioned before. With web-based publication one could even turn those boxes into optional elements, "click here for the scary details"-style. Another example: Martin Gardner: {In which "monster" curves force redefinition of the word "curve"} Scientific American, Mathematical Games, (December-1976) Would it be OK today to include those scary square roots and logarithms? I am afraid todays version would be just images. It's my impression that good articles DID exist and (wild assumption, I know) an audience for them. Today's material (and I must say, quantamagazine.org does a better job than a *lot* of other places) is way to much fancy images with no useful explanation. Best regards, jj P.S. regarding my other ("chill pill") email: Some mild trolling may have been involved.
Andres.
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