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Black Mathematician Month: Closing Ceremony

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 31, 2017

Below is an article marking the end of Black Mathematician Month, written by the team at UCL. We’ve been participating in the project too, and we’ve found it a great opportunity to invite new authors to write for our site and to showcase black mathematicians from the UK and elsewhere. We’ve posted several articles during the month, and hope to continue to feature more diverse authors on the site going forward, with a few more posts anticipated soon.

To mark the end of the month, Dr Nira Chamberlain gave a lecture yesterday at UCL, and if you missed it, the event live-stream will be posted on the Chalkdust social media:  Facebook / Twitter

Ditching the fifth axiom (video)

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 28, 2017

Watch geometer/topologist Caleb Ashley explain the parallel postulate on Numberphile.

Stirling’s numbers in a nutshell

By Audace Amen Vioutou Dossou-Olory. Posted October 25, 2017

This is a guest post by researcher Audace Dossou-Olory of Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

In assignment problems, one wants to find an optimal and efficient way to assign objects of a given set to objects of another given set. An assignment can be regarded as a bijective map $\pi$ between two finite sets $E$ and $F$ of $n\geq 1$ elements. By identifying the sets $E$ and $F$ with $\{1,2,\ldots, n\}$, we can represent an assignment by a permutation.

A new aspect of mathematics

By David Nkansah. Posted October 23, 2017

This is a guest post written by David Nkansah, a mathematics student at the University of Glasgow.

Around the fourth century BC, the term ‘Mathematics’ was defined by Aristotle as the “science of quantity”. It’s my own experience as a young mathematician to say this definition, although correct in its own right, poses a problem for those who do not truly know what mathematics is. It fails to highlight the true creativity of the subject.

Human inspiration and imagination are essential ingredients in mathematics. Regarding creativity, one could say, with merit, that in a sense mathematics is an art. Before proceeding to outline similarities between sketching mathematical proofs and painting on a canvas, it is important to know what fundamental premises mathematical proofs are built on.

Binary, with Anne-Marie Imafidon (video)

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 22, 2017

Watch mathematician and entrepreneur Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE explain binary numbers. Anne-Marie studied for an MSc in mathematics at Oxford University, and founded the social enterprise Stemettes to encourage more women and girls into STEM careers.

Mathematical modelling of Facebook use (video)

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 18, 2017

Watch mathematician and data scientist Jonny explain mathematical modelling of networks.

Circular reasoning on Catalan numbers

By Audace Amen Vioutou Dossou-Olory. Posted October 16, 2017

This is a guest post by researcher Audace Dossou-Olory of Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

Consider the following question: How many ways are there to connect $2n$ points on a circle so that each point is connected to exactly one other point?