A conversation about mathematics inspired by an old textbook, Mathematics in Theory and Practice, edited by Warwick Sawyer. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett.
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Here’s a selection of mathematical stories that crossed our desk in August.
Researchers have discovered that a shape can be designed to trace almost any infinite periodic trajectory when rolling down a slope, as seen in this Nature.com video (via Jeroen van Dorp)
A new diamond open access journal, Innovations in Graph Theory, has been founded. The first issue of the journal is expected to appear in 2024. (via Peter Cameron)
And in important publication news for silly season: Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine have achieved “the true ideal of an unordered set of equal authors, where every author comes first”. Their paper Every Author as First Author proposes a new standard for writing author names on papers and in bibliographies, which places every author as a first author, with the names all superimposed on top of each other, including details of the \namestack LaTeX command for this purpose. The results are predictably hilarious (see below). (via Nalini Joshi)
![Screenshot from paper: "being equal. In our own writing, we try to avoid this practice, and instead write all authors' surnames whenever citing a paper, e.g., "X, Y, and Z [#]". But this workaround becomes impractical for references with over a dozen authors, such as some of our papers (*incomprehensible black smear of overlaid names* 2020; *incomprehensible black smear* 2020) or some papers in astronomy (*incomprehensible black smear* 2006) and biology (*incomprehensible black smear* 2001)."](https://aperiodical.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/image-9.png)
Alison Kiddle has been posting daily conversation prompts involving LEGO to stimulate mathematical thinking on their blog every day in August, and people have been responding on Twitter and Mastodon.
Mathematician and logician Peter Aczel has died, as has Ian G. Macdonald (who introduced Macdonald polynomials).
In this series of posts, we’ll be featuring mathematical podcasts from all over the internet, by speaking to the creators of the podcast and asking them about what they do.
We spoke to Andy Lumley, Head of Learning Technology for educational charity MEI, about their podcast Digging For The Why.
A conversation about mathematics inspired by a scone. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett, with special guest Sophie Maclean.
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In this series of posts, we’ll be featuring mathematical podcasts from all over the internet, by speaking to the creators of the podcast and asking them about what they do.
We spoke to Beth Goodliff from the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics, about their in-house podcast aimed at maths teachers.
A conversation about mathematics inspired by the Joukowsky aerofoil. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett.
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Mathematician and ninja mathematical-thinking-prompter Alison Kiddle has been posting an image each day for the whole of August, each prompting some kind of mathematical question or discussion.