# You're reading: Columns

### Watch this bold decision-maker score 100 at the “is this prime?” game

Fan of the site Ravi Fernando has written in to tell us about his high score at the “is this prime?” game: a cool century!

I’ve been a fan of your “Is this prime?” game for a while, and after seeing your blog post from last May, I thought I’d say hi and send you some high scores.  Until recently, my record was 89 numbers (last March 12), which I think may be the dot in the top right of your “human scores” graph.  But I tried playing some more a couple weeks ago, and I found I can go a little faster using my computer’s y/n buttons instead of my phone’s touch screen.  It turns out 100 numbers is possible!

Watch in amazement:

But, to the delight of prime fans everywhere, he didn’t stop there:

Today I even got 107 – good to have a prime record again.

Well done, Ravi!

Now is a good time to point out that the data on every attempt ever made at the game is available to download, in case you want to do your own analysis: at time of writing, there have been over 625,000 attempts, and 51 is still the number that catches people out the most.

### Carnival of Mathematics 142

The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of January, and compiled by Manan, is now online at Math Misery.

The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.

### Dani’s OEIS adventures: triangular square numbers

Hi! I’m Dani Poveda. This is my first post here on The Aperiodical. I’m from Spain, and I’m not a mathematician (I’d love to be one, though). I’m currently studying a Spanish equivalent to HNC in Computer Networking. I’d like to share with you some of my inquiries about some numbers. In this case, about triangular square numbers.

I’ll start at the beginning.

I’ve always loved maths, but I wasn’t aware of the number of YouTube maths channels there were. During the months of February and March 2016, I started following some of them (Brady Haran’s Numberphile, James Grime and Matt Parker among others). On July 13th, Matt published the shortest maths video he has ever made:

Maybe it’s a short video, but it got me truly mired in those numbers, as I’ve loved them since I read The Number Devil when I was 8. I only needed some pens, some paper, my calculator (Casio fx-570ES) and if I needed extra help, my laptop to write some code. And I had that quite near me, as I had just got home from tutoring high school students in maths.

I’ll start explaining now how I focused on this puzzle trying to figure out a solution.

### Mobile Numbers: Products of Twin Primes

In this series of posts, Katie investigates simple mathematical concepts using the Google Sheets spreadsheet app on her phone. If you have a simple maths trick, pattern or concept you’d like to see illustrated in this series, please get in touch.

Having spoken at the MathsJam annual conference in November 2016 about my previous phone spreadsheet on multiples of nine, I was contacted by a member of the audience with another interesting number fact they’d used a phone spreadsheet to investigate: my use of =MID() to pick out individual digits had inspired them, and I thought I’d share it here in another of these columns (LOL spreadsheet jokes).

### Mathematical genius: extrapolate from your own experience?

The BBC biography series Great Lives covered in its most recent episode Srinivasa Ramanujan. In the closing minutes of the programme, host Matthew Paris said this, which I found quite interesting (or at least, interestingly expressed):

I’m so far from understanding the mind of a mathematical genius that it’s simply inconceivable that you could tell a person an apparently random number and he could intuit or deduce the kind of fact that he deduced about that taxi license number. I mean, I can’t run a four-minute mile, but I once ran a five-minute mile, and I can extrapolate from my own experience, in a way understand how someone might just be a lot better than me at something that, in an inferior way, I can also do. But Ramanujan isn’t like that. It’s as though this man were a different species, not just a superior example of the same species. Can you learn to do this kind of thing? Could I, if I had applied myself? Or is it that goddess again, is it really just genius?

Answers on a postcard!

### Carnival of Mathematics 141

The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of December, and compiled by the team, is now online at Ganit Charcha.

The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.