Assignment 2 Jessica Appel

In today’s day and age, the internet has become one of if not the biggest platforms for sharing information. In particular, social media has risen to such popularity as of late that many people are getting their news solely from it. I know that I personally spend more time than I probably should scrolling through various social media apps, which is what led me to read Chapter 7 of Steven Krantz’s manuscript, The World of High-Tech Publishing.

             In this chapter I was particularly interested in sections 7.3 and 7.4, Mathematical Blogs and Related Ideas and Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the Like. In these sections, Krantz explains in detail what the differences are between a blog and social media. Some of the most important differences include the presence of friends/followers, a news feed, notifications, and a like button on social media and lack thereof on blogs. These differences have led me to use social media more than blogs. Social media is designed to show each user more content that is interesting to them based on posts they have liked or viewed recently, whereas blogs are not. Finding a good blog requires the user to search for it. Perhaps I’ve just not searched hard enough, but I have yet to find a good blog that I’m interested in enough to read regularly.

            Krantz also discusses how social media and blogs could be used for mathematics. While Twitter isn’t exactly the typical spot to announce a newly proven theorem, I do get most of my mathematical news from the app. I follow quite a few mathematicians and mathematical organizations on Twitter, including the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Mathematical Association of America, Olivia Walch, and Jordan Ellenberg. From following accounts like these, I’ve read about a good variety of topics from game theory in the cryptocurrency economy to new mathematical models for predicting disease outbreaks to how abstract algebra can aid in reading music. Social media and these accounts in particular have expanded my knowledge of areas of mathematics that I’ve yet to take classes on. Thus in conclusion, I believe it is a good place for people to stay up to date on the latest happenings in the mathematical world in the age of the internet.