Eugenia Cheng was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert recently. Here it is:
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Mathematical app roundup, October 2015
I notice that our post queue is filling up with interesting mathematical apps, so I thought I’d deal with them all in one big roundup post. Read on for a mix of mathematical games, apps to help with calculations, and some frankly awful art.
Review: Unique polyhedral dice from Maths Gear
Our good friends at Maths Gear have sent us a tube of “unique polyhedral dice” to review. The description on mathsgear.co.uk says they’re “made from polyhedra you don’t normally see in the dice world”. My first thought was that we should test they’re fair by getting David to throw them a few thousand times but — while David was up for it — I’d have to keep score, which didn’t sound fun.
So instead we thought of some criteria we can judge the dice on, and sat down with a teeny tiny video camera. Here’s our review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prFc3Vv0lXs
Intersections by Anila Quayyum Agha
via Colossal
Wherein CP does that exam problem with the crocodile
This morning, Twitter was doing its Twitter thing about a maths problem again. Most people were linking to this BBC story, “Crocodile maths question ‘was challenging'”.
Apparently this year’s Scottish New Higher maths exam contained a question which a lot of people found hard. You could remove the word “crocodile” from that headline and obtain a perfectly acceptable statement about a maths exam, but that’s not what people are complaining about.
Tessellation Art by Chris Watson
Chris Watson has written in to tell us about his site, Tessellation Art, where he sells his heavily Escher-inspired prints. They’re available in a range of sizes and media, and quite affordably priced. I particularly like the print above, titled Vortex.
What I did on my summer holidays
This summer my wife and I went to America on our honeymoon. We had a lovely time – it was hot, we saw stripey flags in all sizes, and we marvelled at what substances count as “food” in the land of the free.
But what I really want to tell you about is the National Museum of Mathematics in New York. We couldn’t fly all the way to the East coast of America and not pay a visit. So we did!
