My wife’s school recently sent round a form with questions about “a day in the life” of people working in STEM careers, to show to their year 6 children. My job involves the M in STEM, so I agreed to have a go at describing my day.
I quite enjoyed describing about what I do, so I’ve decided to reproduce my answers here. Enjoy!
Today is International Women’s Day, so we’ve taken a moment to think about the woman mathematicians in our lives.
We each have fairly sizeable collections of maths books, which prompted CLP to wonder how many of them are by female authors. A quick scan of our respective bookshelves later, here’s what we found.
This tweet by YouGov appeared on my feed:
Forget pepperoni – mushroom is Britain's most liked pizza topping (65%), followed by onion (62%) and then ham (61%) https://t.co/5kYikXOEtF pic.twitter.com/AJezMfJHbk
— YouGov (@YouGov) March 6, 2017
Actually, for the purposes of criticism and comment, here’s a local copy of the image:
It should immediately set your data presentation colly wobbling.
Timothy Chow of MIT has proposed a new Polymath project: resolve Rota’s basis conjecture.
What’s that? It’s this:
… if $B_1$, $B_2$, $\ldots$, $B_n$ are $n$ bases of an $n$-dimensional vector space $V$ (not necessarily distinct or disjoint), then there exists an $n \times n$ grid of vectors ($v_{ij}$) such that
1. the $n$ vectors in row $i$ are the members of the $i$th basis $B_i$ (in some order), and
2. in each column of the matrix, the $n$ vectors in that column form a basis of $V$.
Easy to state, but apparently hard to prove!
Fan of the site Ravi Fernando has written in to tell us about his high score at the “is this prime?” game: a cool century!
I’ve been a fan of your “Is this prime?” game for a while, and after seeing your blog post from last May, I thought I’d say hi and send you some high scores. Until recently, my record was 89 numbers (last March 12), which I think may be the dot in the top right of your “human scores” graph. But I tried playing some more a couple weeks ago, and I found I can go a little faster using my computer’s y/n buttons instead of my phone’s touch screen. It turns out 100 numbers is possible!
Watch in amazement:
But, to the delight of prime fans everywhere, he didn’t stop there:
Today I even got 107 – good to have a prime record again.
Well done, Ravi!
Now is a good time to point out that the data on every attempt ever made at the game is available to download, in case you want to do your own analysis: at time of writing, there have been over 625,000 attempts, and 51 is still the number that catches people out the most.
It was George Boole’s bicentenary in 2015, so the Heslam Trust is a bit slow to reveal its plans to erect a statue of the great man in his home town of Lincoln.
The sculptors, Martin Jennings and Antony Dufort, have come up with a few designs for the statue, and they’d like the public to vote for their favourite.
There’s already a bust of Boole in University College, Cork, installed in plenty of time for the bicentenary. Here’s a picture of me and HRH Poppy Dog standing next to it, last Summer.
Lincoln maths genius to get statue in city – and here are the designs at LincolnshireLive
Proposals for George Boole monument on the City of Lincoln council website
Here’s a selection of news stories about mathematical prizes that have been awarded/announced in the last couple of months.