Stanford University News have posted a press release/interview with Reviel Netz about his book Ludic Proof: Greek Mathematics and the Alexandrian Aesthetic.
You're reading: Posts By Christian Lawson-Perfect
P-p-p-publicise a paper!
We love hearing about new maths but keeping up with the literature is difficult. It’s also quite hard to tell if something outside your field of expertise is noteworthy or not. So we want your help directing our attention towards new and noteworthy research, whether it’s on the arXiv or in peer-reviewed journals or just a rumour someone’s worked out something big.
We’re going to call the column Phil. Trans. Aperiodic., and Nathan Barker, who is currently finishing his PhD at Newcastle University, has kindly offered to run it. He’s going to do a fairly regular, fairly serious round-up of the articles you submit.
So, if you’ve seen some good research lately (or you’ve written some, and you’re really really sure it’s good), please go over to the Phil. Trans. Aperiodic. submission page and fill in our form.
The strange case of Misha Verbitsky and the trademarked beard
A mathematician named Misha Verbitsky was arrested while trying to leave his native Russia for a conference in Poland, and is now banned from leaving the country. Apparently, he had been convicted in absentia of infringing Igor Pugach’s copyright in a blog post criticising him.
AMS introduces “mobile pairing” to enable access from tablets
One of the many annoying thing about academic paywalls, leaving aside whether you think they should exist or not, is that unless you can log in with Athens or Shibboleth, you can only get access through a PC at your university or workplace. If you try to catch up on reading once you’re back at home, it’s often difficult or impossible to get access to journals and other resources your institution subscribes to. This has become a much bigger problem with the advent of the iPad, which is increasingly the device on which people do their reading, often over mobile networks.
The AMS has come up with a solution called “mobile pairing” – if you log in to their site once through your institution’s network, the device you used will then be granted the same access to journals and things like MathSciNet, no matter where you’re connecting from. It just uses browser cookies, so doesn’t require any yucky apps to be installed.
I’ve shaken my fist at my laptop’s screen many a time while trying to look up references on MathSciNet from home, so I think this is great news.
Information: AMS Mobile Pairing
Source: Peter Krautzberger on Twitter
Flat tori in three-dimensional space and convex integration
French researchers Vincent Borrelli, Saïd Jabrane, Francis Lazarus and Boris Thibert have described an isometric embedding of the flat torus in 3D space, using the convex integration theory developed by Gromov in the 1970s. That means they’ve produced a surface which is topologically a torus – it has a single hole — which preserves distances between points in the 4D flat torus. Interestingly, the tangent plane is defined everywhere — the surface is in a sense smooth — but the normal vector is not defined, so it’s also a fractal. This is impossible in higher dimensions
I’ve recorded a short video explaining in a handwavey fashion, with a few props made from things I had lying around, just what has been done.
Aperiodcast – 13/5/2012
In true Aperiodical fashion, we left 13 days before recording another Aperiodcast, so here’s what we think about the last almost-two-weeks on the site.
We talked about:
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Life imitates Life
A while ago somebody created a simulation of Conway’s Game of Life inside a bigger version of the Game of Life. Now, YouTube user Phillip Bradbury has created a very simple — and aurally pleasing ((the Shepard tone is used to create the illusion of a sound constantly increasing in pitch)) — video showing it in action.
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8]
Apparently this is made possible by the Outer Totalistic Cellular Automata Meta-Pixel (OTCAMP), a “two state programmable unit cell which allows Conway’s Life to simulate any outer totalistic rule. OTCAMP is a meta-cell which is also a meta-pixel. OTCAMP meta-pixels display evolving meta-patterns on-screen in meta-realtime.”
An outer totalistic rule is a rule for a cellular automaton which defines the transitions between cell states based on the total number of switched-on surrounding cells surrounding them. The Game of Life is one such rule.
Source: Richard Elwes on Google+.