This Summer, I’m trying something new: I’ve enlisted a few of my favourite mathematicians to take part in a tournament we’re calling
The Summer’s full of instant knock-out tournaments to identify the people at the apex of all sorts of avenues of achievement. I thought, I’ve got a load of fun maths friends, who always tell me about some cool new maths thing whenever I meet them, why not find out who knows the most fun maths?
I’ve made another one of my interactive online maths doodads. You should have a go at it right now. It doesn’t require any effort on your part, other than coming up with a positive integer.
Let’s recite the $13$ times table. Pay attention to the first digit of each number:
\begin{array}{l} \color{blue}13, \\ \color{blue}26, \\ \color{blue}39, \\ \color{blue}52 \end{array}
What happened to $\color{blue}4$‽
A while ago I was working through the $13$ times table for some boring reason, and I was in the kind of mood to find it really quite vexing that the first digits don’t go $1,2,3,4$. Furthermore, $400 \div 13 \approx 31$, so it takes a long time before you see a 4 at all, and that seemed really unfair.
\[ n > 2 \]
An unexpected bit of controversy involving mathematical notation hit the internet last week, when China's government briefly blocked all Chinese internet users from viewing any page or message containing the letter n.
Apparently, those in charge of the Great Firewall feared that those who disapproved of Xi Jinping removing the two-term limit on his presidency of China would use the letter n to refer to the now-arbitrary number of terms for which he can remain in power.
There's some more context in a post by Victor Mair on Language Log, and in the Guardian.
This is nice for International Women's Day. Filmmaker Irina Linke and mathematician Eugénie Hunsicker have put together this montage of women in maths from all around the world.
There's going to be a biopic of physicist/mathematician Stanisław Ulam, titled Adventures of a Mathematician.
Hollywood seems to be working its way through 20th century mathematicians – off the top of my head, there have recently been biopics of John Nash, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking and Srinivasa Ramanujan. What I want to know is, when do we get Michael Sheen playing John Horton Conway?
There's some information about Adventures of a Mathematician, starring Jakub Gierszal as Ulam, at ScreenDaily.
via MathFeed on Twitter.