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We’re all off to MathsJam!

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This organ’s benevolent editing triumvirate is making its way to a conference centre outside Crewe this weekend for our AGM, which happens to coincide this year with the big MathsJam conference. If you’re going as well, please do say hello, and if you’re not, keep an eye on each of our Twitter feed @aperiodical and the #MathsJam hashtag. We’re going to be trying to tweet along with most of what’s happening, as will most of the other 100 attendees, and we’re going to have some good posts lined up for the coming weeks based on what we see there.

Manchester MathsJam, September 2012

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This month saw a record high turnout, requiring as many as three tables being pushed together, a whole bag of maltesers and a tin of shortbread someone got for Christmas and hadn’t eaten yet. We also had one new attendee who had previously been a regular at Newcastle MathsJam, and has now moved to Manchester for a PhD. Not that it’s a competition or anything, but in your face Newcastle. In fact, the turnout was so large that I couldn’t even keep track of everything that was going on, and when I collected in all the scrap paper I found people had written down several things I wasn’t aware we talked about, including the method for cube rooting large numbers used by Maths Busking.

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Manchester MathsJam Recap, August 2012

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This month was a small group, but MathsJam is serious business so we got through loads of fun in the time allotted for fun. To start with, we hacked away at Leeds’ tweeted starter for ten:

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Maths Jam July 2012 – Paper Enigma

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Having discovered this wonderful design for a paper Enigma machine, which uses a standard size crisp tube and does a pretty good job of encoding things like an Enigma machine, I decided it was worth trying it out. What better opportunity to use something which can encode secret messages than to send messages between two monthly Maths Jam events via the medium of Twitter? The public sending of the messages would be incomprehensible to anyone not willing to get their hands dirty with a crisp tube and scissors. Unless they’ve got an actual Enigma machine.

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Manchester MathsJam July 2012 Recap

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This month we had two new attendees, as well as some regulars. We talked about lots of different things, although one recurring theme was the Crisp Tube Enigma machine, which we were using to send coded messages to Newcastle MathsJam. There will shortly be a video chronicling our achievements, and I’ll post a link to the video and writeup here once it’s ready.

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