The Aperiodical 

You're reading: Monthly Archives: October 2012

Aperiodcast – 21/10/2012

By Christian Lawson-Perfect and Peter Rowlett. Posted October 21, 2012

Here’s another episode of our irregular podcast about what’s been happening on the site.

This time, we talked about:

• Advances in pure nonsense
• Robert Schneider, Mathematical Musician/Musical Mathematician
• #MTT2K: Teachers critique Khan Academy
• Surds: what are they good for?
• Calculus of the Nervous System
• The new fonts on the site
• Christian’s new Aperiodical Round Up and Interesting Esoterica Summation
• Puzzlebomb October 2012

Christian apologises for the poor sound quality, an unavoidable consequence of being at the family home for the weekend without a proper microphone.

As always, we’re keen to hear about your mathematical exploits either by email at root@aperiodical.com, our twitter @aperiodical, or whatever means you can think of to get in contact with us.



Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS | List of episodes

Math/Maths 117: Did Darwin’s Finches do Relatively Prime?

By Peter Rowlett. Posted October 21, 2012

A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released.

A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. This week Samuel and Peter spoke about: Martin Gardner’s Birthday; Relatively Prime; Marriage as a Nobel-winning Economic Problem; Women in Wikipedia Edit-a-thon; Relatively Prime; Did Darwin’s Finches Do Math?; Destroying drug cartels, the mathematical way; Relatively Prime; Jo Boaler reveals attacks by Milgram and Bishop; UK to invest in a future generation of code-breakers; 2nd Birthdays of Mathblogging.org and getstats; Relatively Prime; Maths Week Ireland; Tails You Win: The Science Of Chance; Maths check across Whitehall after West Coast rail line fiasco; and more, and of course Relatively Prime.

Get this episode: Math/Maths 117: Did Darwin’s Finches do Relatively Prime?

Complexity analysis approach to tackling drug cartels

By Peter Rowlett. Posted October 21, 2012

New Scientist reports on a new complexity analysis approach to Mexican drug cartels. Pointing out that removing the leader of a cartel is often cited as a major victory in the war on drugs, the article says that in fact more minor players with key connections might be more useful targets. The article explains that the approach

depicts drugs cartels as a complex network with each member as a node and their interactions as lines between them. Algorithms compute the strength and importance of the connections. At first glance, taking out a central “hub” seems like a good idea… But like a hydra, chopping off the head only caused the cartel to splinter into smaller networks.

Apparently this reveals “links that are not otherwise visible… people who are not well-connected, but serve as a bridge linking two groups”, whose removal “could devastate [cartel] operations”. This is not the approach that has been historically taken and the New Scientist has some discussion of the relative merits.

More information: Destroying drug cartels, the mathematical way.

Via @RickCrawf on Twitter.

Two years in: getstats

By Peter Rowlett. Posted October 21, 2012

Yesterday the Royal Statistical Society/Nuffield Foundation collaboration getstats celebrated its second birthday.

Those of us with long enough memories might recall that getstats, a 10-year statistical literacy campaign, was launched with great fanfare at 8:10pm on World Statistics Day, 20th October 2010 (20:10 20.10.2010). Then-President David Hand was quoted at the time saying

Numbers are everywhere in our lives, and statistics is about turning these numbers into useful information on which we can take action. People need to appreciate the power of statistics as it can be the key to the important choices we make in our lives.

Urgent review of Government calculations underway

By Peter Rowlett. Posted October 21, 2012

According to an article behind the Times paywall which I haven’t read, an “urgent review is under way into the reliability of some of the Government’s most crucial calculations in the wake of the West Coast Main Line shambles“.

The part of the article above the paywall reports that checks for ensuring the accuracy of models for climate change, income distribution, benefit claims and farming subsidies are all included in the audit. Website PoliticsHome expands on the basic Times link, saying that “every Government department has been required to draw up a list of ‘business critical’ models that they rely on to do their jobs”.

If you subscribe to The Times, you can get the rest of the story on its website: Maths check across Whitehall after West Coast rail line fiasco.

Foreign Office gives Bletchley Park £480,000 and announces GCHQ apprenticeships

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted October 20, 2012



Having neglected the home of wartime codebreaking since it packed up and left with the end of hostilities, it looks like the Foreign Office is Turing over a new leaf – Foreign Secretary William Hague paid a visit to Bletchley Park on Thursday to make a couple of announcements that will please both amateur and more serious codebreakers.

Women in Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 20, 2012

At the Royal Society this week, they’ve celebrated Ada Lovelace Day with an Edit-A-Thon of everyone’s favourite The Free Encyclopedia. A group gathered yesterday to hack away at some of Wikipedia’s most neglected entries – those covering famous females. Partly due to the under-representation of women in editing, such articles can be under-developed and/or have a male slant.

While Ada Lovelace’s entry is pretty impressive and full of information about the pioneering mathematician, there are many others worthy of note which haven’t had so much attention. This article in The Guardian describes some examples of pages which need sprucing up, and the planned list of pages to edit can be found here.

Many other events are being planned along similar lines, including this one at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and this one in Manchester. Why not join in and edit some pages yourself?