Maths at the British Science Festival 2016

bsf

Next week, the British Science Festival will take place in Swansea, in and around the University. Here’s our round-up of all the mathsiest of the maths events taking place during the week. Our own Katie Steckles will be there introducing most of these events, so you might spot her at the front telling you what to do if there’s a fire. You’ll need to register to book tickets, but all the events are free.

Integer Sequence Reviews: A075771, A032799, A002717

It’s been almost two years since I last sat down with my friend David Cushing and did what God put us on this Earth to do: review integer sequences.

This week I lured David into my office with promises of tasty food and showed him some sequences I’d found. Thanks to (and also in spite of) my Windows 10 laptop, the whole thing was recorded for your enjoyment. Here it is:

I can only apologise for the terrible quality of the video – I was only planning on using it as a reminder when I did a write-up, but once we’d finished I decided to just upload it to YouTube and be done with it.

Puzzlebomb – July 2016

Puzzlebomb Logo

Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 55 of Puzzlebomb, for July 2016, can be found here:

Puzzlebomb – Issue 55 – July 2016 (printer-friendly version)

There’s also an online electronic version of the puzzle in this issue.

The solutions to Issue 55 can be found here:

Puzzlebomb – Issue 55 – Solutions – July 2016 (printer-friendly version)

Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found at Puzzlebomb.co.uk.

Exam timing

When I have been involved with running exams (I wasn’t, really, this year), special care seems to be made to spread these out so that where possible students don’t get exams bunched together. Still, I’ve heard students complain “we only have one day off between the Monday and Wednesday exams, that isn’t enough time to revise for the second topic”. I have a lot of sympathy for this; assessing a module (or proportion thereof) by how you perform in a one-, two- or three-hour window is quite a problematic arrangement, and if you haven’t had sufficient time to get up to speed on the topic, even more so. But I have had in mind that, essentially, “when I were a lad, we had it much worse”. Clearing out some boxes to move house, I found exam timetables from five of the six semesters I spent as an undergraduate, so now I can confirm or refute my feeling on this, in the latest of my series of posts that are surely only of interest to me.