With the announcement the Queen’s Birthday Honours list, it’s time for the latest in our ongoing Honours-watch series of posts. In this, we search arbitrarily for ‘mathematics’ in the PDFs of the various lists, and hope our well-informed readers fill in the blanks where actual knowledge is required.
You're reading: Posts By Katie Steckles
IMA 50th Anniversary events
The IMA turns 50 this year, and is holding two celebration events and publishing a book.
Carnival of Mathematics 111
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of May, and compiled by Peter Krauzberger, is now online at Boole’s Rings.
The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.
Puzzlebomb – June 2014
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 30 of Puzzlebomb, for June 2014, can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 30 – June 2014
The solutions to Issue 30 can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 30 – June 2014 – Solutions
Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
Vi Hart has 3D printed a hypercube made of monkeys that has the symmetries of the Quaternion group
Group theorists, often interested principally in the abstract, have been known to neglect the vital importance of producing funky gizmos that exhibit the symmetries they have theorized about. Internet maths celeb Vi Hart, working with mathematician Henry Segerman, has addressed this absence in the case of $Q_8$, the quaternion group. The object they’ve designed is four-dimensional and made of monkeys, and they’ve done the closest thing possible to making one, which is to 3D-print an embedding of it into our three-dimensional universe, also made of monkeys. Their ArXiv preprint (pdf) is well worth a read, and when you get to the photos of the resulting sculpture (entitled “More fun than a hypercube of monkeys”), you’ll fall off your chair.
Further reading
The Quaternion Group as a Symmetry Group by Vi Hart and Henry Segerman, on the ArXiv.
Nothing Is More Fun than a Hypercube of Monkeys at Roots of Unity, including an animated gif of a virtual version of the sculpture rotating through 4D-space.
Matt Parker talks percentages
If anyone caught BBC1’s consumer moanfest Watchdog this week, they may have been pleasantly surprised to see Aperiodicobber ((The internet assures me that ‘cobber’ is Australian slang for ‘friend’.)) Matt Parker featured in the show. Following a segment about a UK sports chain and its shocking use of the classic ‘UP TO 70% OFF’ ruse, they invited Matt on the show to explain how to calculate percentages more easily, and so that Anne Robinson could mock him for being Australian, apparently.
Since the tips Matt presented were useful, we at the Aperiodical thought it was worth reproducing Parker’s Patented Percentage Ploys here, for your reference.
Google Doodle: The Witch of Agnesi
Today’s Google doodle (for those not in the know, the Google homepage alters its header based on the date, and on dates of special nerdy significance, they theme them around relevant birthdays/anniversaries) is about Maria Gaetana Agnesi, a female mathematician. Agnesi was born on 16th May 1718, making today her 296th birthday. This means you have four years to prepare for her 300th birthday bash, which I hear is going to go off big style.