After an unexpectedly long wait of over three weeks, here’s the third Aperiodcast, discussing what’s happened on the site between 13/5/2012 and 3/6/2012. You’ll notice that we recorded this podcast four days ago – we were all having too much jubilee fun to find time to upload it! Anyway, we had lots to talk about, so please do have a listen.
Posts discussed in this episode:
Has schoolboy genius solved problems that baffled mathematicians for centuries? by Christian and Peter
The Table Never Lies by Mr. Gregg
Puzzlebomb – June 2012 by Katie
In what flipping dimension is a square peg in a round hole just as good as a round peg in a square hole? by Card Colm
The strange case of Misha Verbitsky and the trademarked beard by Christian
P-p-p-publicise a paper! by Christian and Nathan
Aperiodical Round Up 6 – It glides to a stop as it reaches the end of the power stroke by Christian
Open Access Update – 25th of May by Christian
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There was a lovely “I don’t know any maths” story at the IMA’s ECM conference a few weeks ago. One of the speakers had called in a plumber to fix a leak, and during conversation the plumber said that he’d never liked maths, or was never any good at it.
But, completely unrelated to that, he was very interested in cryptography. So this guy with no knowledge of or interest in maths was happily explaining RSA and Fermat’s Little Theorem and so on. He’d never made the connection between this and the subject he hated at school.