The classic birthday problem asks how many people are required to ensure a greater than 50% chance of having at least one birthday match, meaning that two or more people share a birthday. The surprisingly small answer, assuming that all birthdays are equally likely and ignoring leap years like 2012, is 23 people.
You're reading: Yearly Archives: 2012
What’s the (implicit) equation for “equation”?
See for yourself with this inverse graphing calculator.
2012 Loebner Prize to be held at Bletchley Park & streamed online
The 2012 Loebner Prize competition (based on the Turing test) will be held at Bletchley Park. A Bletchley Park Trust press release explains the competition procedure:
The judges at the competition will conduct conversations with the four finalist chatbots and with some human surrogates, and will then rank all their conversation partners from most humanlike to least humanlike. The chatbot with the highest overall ranking wins the prize [a bronze medal and $7,000].
The competition will take place on 15 May 2012, starting at 1:00pm. Visitors to the Park will be able to follow the conversations on screens in the Mansion and these will also be streamed live online for the first time.
Carnival of Mathematics 86 submissions are due
The next Carnival of Mathematics, a monthly blogging round up hosted by a different blog each month and coordinated by The Aperiodical, will be hosted at The Math Less Travelled in May 2012. Submissions are due by Tuesday so please consider any blog posts either you have written or you have enjoyed on another blog this month and submit them to the Carnival.
APPROXYMOTION by Peter A Vikar
[vimeo url=http://vimeo.com/40641882]
Peter’s site is full of beautifully stark geometric/topological art
Classic maths books reset with LaTeX on Project Gutenberg
I was going to save this for an Aperiodical Round Up but it’s such a good thing I thought I’d post it straight away. Project Gutenberg has moved on from offering just plain-text transcriptions of books: volunteers have been outstandingly generous with their time and produced LaTeX versions of many maths books, producing versions that are considerably more readable and resemble the original editions much more closely.
Not all the books in that list have been converted to LaTeX yet. Of those that have, GH Hardy’s A Course of Pure Mathematics leaps out as a good place to start. Compare it with this book still in HTML format to see the difference.
(via reddit)
New Careers section on Plus Magazine
Plus Magazine have launched a new careers section. Aimed at teachers, students, career advisors and parents, the section offers a glimpse of where maths can take you. For a long time these have been the best sources of careers advice for mathematics in the UK so a collaboration should be very fruitful.
This gives information on the wide range of careers that use mathematics – from avalanche research and planning the Olympics to designing computer games or saving lives in developing countries – containing career profiles and in-depth career interviews, as well as advice from employers and information on how to enter a career with maths.
The new careers section is a collaboration between Plus and the MathsCareers website, which was developed by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the London Mathematical Society and the Royal Statistical Society.