# Random walks on slides

Some grad students at Carnegie Mellon had a fun idea: what if each slide in a presentation was made by a different person, based only on the previous slide?

Being grad students and thus having nothing better to be getting on with, they did just that, and nominated one of their number to deliver the resulting presentation without having seen any of the slides in advance.

Watch the video below. Prepare to hear lots of nerdy giggling.

via Haggis the Sheep on Twitter

# abc: the story so far

You should take some time to read this very well-written piece about Shin Mochizuki’s claimed proof of the abc conjecture: “The Paradox of the Proof”, by Caroline Chen.

It covers the story from all angles: a biog of Mochizuki, a clear, non-nonsense description of the conjecture, the tale of the mathematical community’s attempts to understand it, and some insightful rumination on the nature of proof.

via Marcus du Sautoy on Twitter, among others

(TL;DR – still nobody knows whether the proof is correct or not)

# Carnival of Mathematics 98

The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of April, is now online at Andrew Taylor’s blog.

The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. For more information about the Carnival of Mathematics, click here.

# Integer sequence review: A010727

The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences contains over 200,000 sequences. It contains classics, curios, thousands of derivatives entered purely for completeness’s sake, short sequences whose completion would be a huge mathematical achievement, and some entries which are just downright silly.

For a lark, David and I have decided to review some of the Encyclopedia’s sequences. We’ll be rating sequences on four axes: Novelty, Aesthetics, Explicability and Completeness.

#### A010727 Constant sequence: the all 7′s sequence.

7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7, ...

# Monthly MathsJams – November 2012 Survey Data

Those of you with long, long memories (and who attend a MathsJam) may recall that back in November 2012, MathsJam HQ sent out a questionnaire to monthly regional meetups, with various questions about attendance and ping-pong balls. The purpose of the survey was to get a snapshot of what the monthly MathsJams are like, as well as to produce some spurious graphs. Christian and I, who run the Newcastle and Manchester MathsJams respectively, were tasked with analysing the data. Here are our findings!

# Newcastle MathsJam March and April 2013 Recap

Better late than never, I’ve posted my recap of Newcastle MathsJam’s March and April meetings on my mathem-o-blog. We talked about topology, made a tiny blanket for a baby snake, failed to work a cardboard computer, and a lot more.