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You're reading: Posts By Christian Lawson-Perfect
- Mathematical Christmas cracker jokes
- Fractal Christmas trees
- Posts from MathsJam speakers – Tom Button on Radii of Polyhedra and Phil Harvey on AS Results and Batting Averages
- The Aperiodical’s Mathematical Survey
- Carnival of Mathematics 94
Chrome now supports MathML
Update 07/02/2013: Google giveth, and it taketh away. MathML support in Chrome has been disabled until it’s “production-ready”.
Putting maths on the web has always been a tricky proposition. Typesetting notation is a highly complicated procedure, so for years people have got by either by compromising on aesthetics and writing equations in plain, unadorned text, or by using off-line LaTeX compilers to make blurry images of what they’re trying to say.
This is an ex-parrot. ‘Is plumage has dimension 1
A paper by Lorenzo Pérez-Rodríguez, Roger Jovani and François Mougeot in Proceedings B, “Fractal geometry of a complex plumage trait reveals bird’s quality“, claims that the measurement of the fractal dimension of a red-legged partridge’s chest plumage is a good indicator of its health.
I know what you’re thinking: another ‘non-mathematicians pick trendy term to describe something rather different’ story, but actually the authors do quite a good job of explaining and justifying their method. I’m convinced!
Plumage patterns are the product of reaction-diffusion systems which probably don’t really produce fractal dimension, but the researchers needed a fairly easy and consistent way of measuring the complexity of patterns. A healthy bird can produce more melanin, which can produce more complicated patterns. For the level of detail needed, the researchers say that the box-counting method of computing fractal dimension is a quick way of measuring the effect they’re looking for.
Paper: Fractal geometry of a complex plumage trait reveals bird’s quality, by Lorenzo Pérez-Rodríguez, Roger Jovani and François Mougeot, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
via Slashdot
Art by Owen Schuh
The Good, the Bad and Gowers
Prof Sir Tim Gowers has published a couple of very interesting posts on his blog this week, explaining his thinking behind a couple of announcements to do with Open Access.
Aperiodcast – Christiansmas Eve 2013
After two months we’ve finally done another podcast! We completely forgot even the most rudimentary things about how to do a podcast. Sorry.
In this episode, we talked about:
As always, we’re keen to hear about your mathematical exploits either by email to root@aperiodical.com or through our new, streamlined sending-something-in form.
If you’ve got some ideas for how we can do a better podcast, we’d be particularly keen to hear from you.
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The Aperiodical’s Possibly Annual Awards for Mathematical Achievement
Christian Perfect: 2012 was an alright year. At the very least, all of it happened, which is better than some had predicted. And since 2012 did happen, we are obliged by the Laws of Something to give out some awards.
Katie Steckles: Of course, the most noteworthy thing which happened in 2012 was the creation of an amazing mathematical blogging website, but I don’t mean to go on too much about that. Anyway, we’ve gathered together some candidates for some categories we made up, and will decide on our favourites via the process of arguing.
CP: Allons-y!