The Aperiodical 

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Join the Aperiodical News Team

By Peter Rowlett, Christian Lawson-Perfect and Katie Steckles. Posted January 28, 2013

There’s too much maths news for us to cover, so we’re looking for a few volunteers to help out in our new News Team.

A fairly big part of what this site is for is to cover mathematical news. We like to write short, to-the-point posts pointing to the relevant information about current events. These don’t have to be as in-depth as a feature or column blog post, but are a great way to keep everyone aware of what is going on in the mathematical world.

Most weeks we find more stories than we find time to write up, and the three of us (Katie, CP and Peter) have ever-growing work commitments, so we’re seeing if anyone wants to help out. Read on to find out what’s involved, or if you’re feeling nosy about how we write up news.

Manchester MathsJam January 2013 Recap

By Katie Steckles. Posted January 23, 2013

The first MathsJam of the year was well attended. Despite not being on our usual table (there was no jazz band on this week, so we were allowed a bigger table further into the pub) everyone found us ok, and a few people brought baked goods – always a precursor to an excellent MathsJam.

We started off with some quick mental arithmetic brainteasers: how many straight cuts do you need to make to slice a flat square cake into 196 equally sized square pieces? Several people got the answer quite quickly, while others tried to cheat by stacking cake pieces and moving them around between cuts. No cheating!

Save the Ri

By Katie Steckles. Posted January 21, 2013

It’s been in the news this week that the Royal Institution is having financial trouble, and is considering selling its London headquarters at Albemarle Street. The organisation has done a great deal for the popularisation of mathematics over the years, from including mathematics in its series of annual Christmas Lectures (delivered by Christopher Zeeman in 1978, by Ian Stewart in 1997 and Marcus Du Sautoy in 2006) as well as running an excellent series of mathematics and engineering masterclasses for primary and secondary schools, since 1981. They also have a dedicated maths team, who post maths resources on the Ri website.

Professor Sir Harry Kroto, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, has started a blog called “Save the Ri” and posted a highly outraged open letter calling on interested parties to “make it clear to the Government and others in positions of responsibility that we are outraged by the decision to put the premises up for sale”. He’s also posted a statement outlining the situation, and indicating his support of the ‘Save 21 Albemarle Street’ campaign, on Facebook and Twitter.

UPDATE: MP Valerie Vaz has tabled an Early Day Motion in Parliament about this, although it currently only has 9 signatures. There’s also an e-petition, calling for the government to purchase the building and let the Ri stay there permanently.

Aperiodcast – Christiansmas Eve 2013

By Christian Lawson-Perfect and Katie Steckles. Posted January 13, 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:

• 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

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 nonsense math effect

By Katie Steckles. Posted January 13, 2013

This week, the Freakonomics blog covered research by Stockholm University’s Kimmo Eriksson, which found that including a mathematical equation in the abstract of a research paper made scholars from different fields judge the research to be ‘of higher quality’, even though the equation is unrelated to the work and also complete nonsense. The study included 200 participants, although the amount by which the equation increased the perceived ‘quality’ of research varied between disciplines, and in fact caused a slight decrease for people working in mathematics or science subjects.

Via Tim Harford on Twitter.

The Aperiodical’s Possibly Annual Awards for Mathematical Achievement

By Katie Steckles and Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted January 8, 2013

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!

2013: I can be the year of stuff too!

By Katie Steckles. Posted January 8, 2013

2013 will be the first year since 1987 in which all digits are different from one-another.

— The QI Elves (@qikipedia) December 31, 2012

In case you were bored of hearing that amazing ‘mathematical’ fact number coincidence, don’t worry – 2013 is mathematical for other reasons. Even though we’ve run out of Alan Turing Centenary year, and the slightly-under-mentioned Poincaré Centenary year, apparently 2013 is both The International Year of Statistics (Statistics2013) and the year of scientific collaboration project Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013. Watch out for upcoming events related to both!