# Review: Factris

Removing four lines at once with an I-piece in Tetris is the most efficient way to score, which creates a tension: on one hand, you want to build high enough to score quickly, but on the other, building too high puts you at risk of ending the game. The balance between the two is exquisite.

I mention that, because I was about to grumble that the corresponding balance in MEI Maths’s new game app thingummy Factris isn’t quite as good – of course it isn’t. Nothing ever will be.

# Landon Clay, founder of the Clay Mathematics Institute, has died

The Clay Mathematics Institute, home of the Clay Millennium Maths Prizes, has announced the sad death of its founder, Landon Clay. “Driven by a deep appreciation of the beauty and importance of mathematical ideas”, Clay donated generously to many organisations and projects, including the Institute which he founded in 1998.

Statement on the CMI website, including an addendum from Andrew Wiles

via @LondMathSoc

# Maths at the Edinburgh Fringe

Every August a multitude of comedy shows, theatre pieces, interpretive dance performances, musical extravaganzas and spoken word events spring up all over the Edinburgh Fringe. As a busy mathematician (there are infinitely many integers; who has spare time?) I’m sure you’ll appreciate our guide to which of those things are mathematical, or have a tangential (LOL) relationship with mathematics. Please note: none of these are recommendations, as we haven’t seen the shows and mainly have been grepping the word ‘maths’ in online programmes.

# News of some significance

You may have heard of the replicability crisis in science, and practices like outcome switching and p-hacking. BuzzFeed reports on a paper that proposes a solution: rather than assign statistical significance at $p=0.05$, change this value to $0.005$.

Sir David Spiegelhalter is quoted saying: “Dealing with the size of the p-value fixes some things. But it’s not dealing with the most important issues.” There’s a lot more in the BuzzFeed article and the full paper.