Our mathematical face-off continues with our second match: from Group 2, it’s Marianne Freiberger and Rachel Thomas competing as a single mathematical unit vs Vincent Pantaloni. Their pitches are below, and at the end of this post there’s a poll where you can vote for your favourite bit of maths.
Take a look at both pitches, vote for the bit of maths that made you do the loudest “Aha!”, and if you know any more cool facts about either of the topics presented here, please write a comment below!
Welcome to The Big Internet Math-Off! Over the next month, 16 intrepid mathematicians are going to be sharing some of their favourite bits of maths in a series of head-to-head matches that will leave all of us mathematically enriched and all but one of them wishing they’d read more Martin Gardner.
The tournament starts today with our first match in group 1: Alex Corner vs Lucy Rycroft-Smith. They’ve each made a pitch for a fun bit of maths, which is below, and at the end of this post there’s a poll where you can vote for your favourite bit of maths.
If you know any more cool facts about either of the topics presented here, please write a comment below!
So, without further ado, let’s once more toot Gabriel’s Horn and start The Big Internet Math-Off for 2019! First up is Alex Corner.
Because we all had so much fun last year, we’re running a second edition of the internet’s hottest maths competition:
Continuing our mission to provide alternative summer knock-out tournaments that don’t involve grassy fields, we’ve invited 16 more fun maths people to tell us about some fun maths things.
It’s π eve, and I’ve had a silly idea: I’m going to take the ridiculous website I made to show all the digits of π, and stream it scrolling indefinitely through them over the internet.
Starting at midnight GMT on 2019-03-14, the stream below will start scrolling down through the digits of π:
I had this idea this morning, and it’s running on my desktop PC which I’ll be away from until 8am tomorrow, so I won’t be surprised if something goes wrong.
But if it doesn’t: hooray!
It was an open question whether 33 could be written as the sum of three cubes. Thanks to Andrew R. Booker, it now isn’t.
\begin{array}{c} (8866128975287528)^3 \\ + \\(-8778405442862239)^3 \\ + \\(-2736111468807040)^3 \\ = \\ 33\end{array}
Because of my statistically improbable stature, it’s really hard to find clothes that fit me. So, most days I wear the lowest common denominator of all clothing styles, a t-shirt. And if I’m wearing a t-shirt, it might as well be Extremely On Brand CP and have some obscure mathematical motif on it.
Good maths t-shirts are hard to come by, so I’ve made four of my own.
I haven’t let lack of illustrating ability get in my way, and I’m quite pleased with how they’ve turned out.
February is Black History Month in the USA, so the website Mathematically Gifted and Black is honouring a different black mathematician each day in February, for the third year.