Here’s a round-up of some mathematical news stories from this month.
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Aperiodical Design Competition: Fractal Bunting
Since people might be looking for something distracting they can do at home around now, we’re running another fun competition to keep you occupied – much like our π-ku poetry competition in July, we’re looking for anyone who has a spare slice of brain to come up with a design for our fractal bunting competition.
PuzzleBomb is a thing again!
Me (Katie) and Paul have restarted our regular monthly puzzle sheets, which were previously hosted here on the Aperiodical, in the form of a Patreon. If you like slightly silly, slightly clever puzzles and want to support what we’re doing, you can sign up as a patron to be sent puzzles each month and access past editions.
Subscribers can expect an all-new A4 PDF of word, number and logic puzzles, delivered direct to their inbox on the 15th of each month. The standard subscription rate is £2 inc. VAT, and a higher tier (£4) is available for subscribers who want to get extra occasional bigger/stupider/more difficult puzzles (including cryptic crosswords), and access to hints and other puzzle tools.
A sample PDF of puzzles is available now on the PuzzleBomb Patreon page, and the first proper edition will be out on 15th September.
Updates to Mathigon mobile apps
Mathigon is an online interactive textbook for mathematics, which we’ve written about here before. They’ve just launched updated versions of the phone/tablet app version of their site, including new features and an offline mode.
Not Mentioned on The Aperiodical, Summer 2020
Since we’re all busy people, sometimes news and other interesting bits of maths don’t get reported quite as they happen. Here’s a few stories that slipped through the cracks over the summer.
2020 Christopher Zeeman Medal awarded to Matt Parker
Stand-up Mathematician and internet superstar Matt Parker has been awarded the 2020 IMA/LMS Christopher Zeeman Medal, which aims to recognise and acknowledge the contributions of mathematicians involved in promoting mathematics to the public and engaging with the public in mathematics in the UK.
π-ku Poetry Competition – Results
A few weeks ago, we asked you to write some mathematical poetry – π-ku, which are a bit like Haiku but instead of the structure 5-7-5, they use the more classical 3-1-4 format (and it doesn’t just have to be syllables – valid π-ku can also use 3, 1 and 4 words on each line, if you prefer).
You responded in large quantities – across Twitter and email, we received over 100 entries, from fun ditties to serious, beautiful poems. Since none of us here at the Aperiodical are particularly well-versed (pun intended) in poetry, we consulted maths/poetry aficionado and special guest judge JoAnne Growney, who runs a blog collating mathematical poems over at Poetry With Mathematics.