John Baez, the very first maths blogger, has started a new blog called Visual Insight. It’s hosted by the American Mathematical Society and is “a place to share striking images that help explain advanced topics in mathematics.”
So that’ll be nice.
You're reading: Posts By Christian Lawson-Perfect
Translate Numberphile, please / Traduisez Numberphile, s’il-vous-plaît / Bitte übersetzen Numberphile…
Numberphile is that cool YouTube channel with the videos about the numbers and the philes. You might remember them from the time they did that ace video about our integer sequence reviews. But if you’re unlucky enough not to understand the English as she is spoke, then that’s no use to you.
But it could be! Chief Numberphile Brady Haran has set up a page asking for translations of the videos, so everyone can enjoy them. As long as you’re fluent in one of the languages for which a video already has subtitles, the process is pretty simple: you download a caption file in one language, translate it into another, and upload it back to the site. And then you’ve done a good deed!
Brady’s just posted on Twitter that he’s already approved 24 translations since starting the project yesterday evening, so join your fellow Frenchmen/Flemings/Faroese and get translating. (I suggest you start with “Six Sequences”…)
Submit a translation: Translations for Numberphile at subtitl.us
Deligne Day: October 5, 2013
A bit of press release copy-pasting for you now, as the Simons Foundation announced a celebration of the mathematics of Pierre Deligne. When the release first went out it was called ‘Deligne Day’, but cooler heads have prevailed and it’s now “A Celebration of the Mathematics of Pierre Deligne”. It’s also my dad’s birthday, as it happens.
Computational mathematics in the cloud with Sagemath
Sage is a free, open-source computational mathematics system in the vein of things like Mathematica and Maple. For the past few years, there’s been an online version called the Sage Notebook which worked pretty well, but it was pretty slow and not particularly easy to use.
Now the creator of Sage, William Stein, has started work on The Sagemath Cloud. It’s considerably more ambitious than Sage notebook – as well as the Sage notebook interface, it gives you a sophisticated area where you can write LaTeX files with live preview, work on IPython notebooks, and even bring up a Unix terminal to do the kinds of things you need a Unix terminal for.
Yoshimoto Friends
Here’s a happy little film starring two Yoshimoto cubes, by Justin Lanier and Paul Salomon of Math Munch. Enjoy!
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZi5FhAwFgI]
Euclid’s Kiss: Geometric Sculpture of George Hart
George Hart is putting on a one-man show of his sculptures at Stony Brook University. He’s posted this video of him walking through the exhibition and describing the pieces on display.
[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI1612YhMqg]
George also gave a lecture to open the exhibition, which you can watch on the SCGP website.
Euclid’s Kiss: Geometric Sculpture of George Hart is on display at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics during September and October.
More information: Euclid’s Kiss: Geometric Sculpture of George Hart
Toast formula
ACHTUNG: This post contains no information which could progress humanity’s understanding of the universe it inhabits. It contains links to several terrible newspapers. I have not fixed any of the issues in the source material, typographical, mathematical, grammatical, or otherwise. We are about to plumb the depths of innumeracy and inanity; consider yourself warned.
The Manchester Evening News published a story a few days ago with this unusual headline: “(-Rav)/ t = R: Manchester boffins find formula for why toast lands butter side down”. Maybe the w (or ω) was present in the print version. Anyway, the article hits most of the bad formula reporting points: poorly typeset formula in headline; no explanation of variables; no link to the paper or the researchers; use of the word “boffins”; use of the phrase “infuriated puzzled scientists for more than a century”; formula invented to promote a product.