The next Carnival of Mathematics, a monthly blogging round up hosted by a different blog each month and coordinated by The Aperiodical, will be hosted at The Math Less Travelled in May 2012. Submissions are due by Tuesday so please consider any blog posts either you have written or you have enjoyed on another blog this month and submit them to the Carnival.
You're reading: Posts By Peter Rowlett
New Careers section on Plus Magazine
Plus Magazine have launched a new careers section. Aimed at teachers, students, career advisors and parents, the section offers a glimpse of where maths can take you. For a long time these have been the best sources of careers advice for mathematics in the UK so a collaboration should be very fruitful.
This gives information on the wide range of careers that use mathematics – from avalanche research and planning the Olympics to designing computer games or saving lives in developing countries – containing career profiles and in-depth career interviews, as well as advice from employers and information on how to enter a career with maths.
The new careers section is a collaboration between Plus and the MathsCareers website, which was developed by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the London Mathematical Society and the Royal Statistical Society.
Volcanic eruptions follow Benford’s Law
An article in Ars Technica reports on an investigation of the area and ages of volcanic calderas and the duration of volcanic eruptions between 1900 and 2009 in relation to Benford’s Law.
Apparently Benford’s laws fit the eruption duration data “very well” and caldera areas offer “pretty good” fit, though the latter indicated that “some excessive rounding may have taken place”. The caldera eruption ages showed a marked deviation.
Biography of Turing by his mother republished
Barry Cooper, Professor of Pure Mathematics at Leeds and Chair of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee, writes in the Guardian a personal account of an interest in Turing and his efforts to get the limited edition biography written by Turing’s mother Sara republished.
Written from a mother’s viewpoint, Sara provides a unique insight into the early years of Turing, with candid descriptions such as, “In dress and habits he tended to be slovenly. His hair was usually too long, with an overhanging lock which he would toss back with a jerk of his head.” But the book is full of brilliant treasures, anecdotal accounts of Turing’s eccentricity and genius, and insights into his science.
Source: De-coding the Turing family.
Running model in reverse to determine rate of extinction not reliable
An article on the BBC News website outlines methods for determining numbers used in measures of biodiversity loss, such as the claim by the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2007 that we are “experiencing the greatest wave of extinction since the disappearance of the dinosaurs”. One problem, the BBC explains, is that
No-one knows how many species exist. And if we don’t know a species exists, we won’t miss it when it’s gone.
Alan Turing papers on code breaking released by GCHQ
The BBC reports that two papers by Alan Turing, believed to have been written while he was working at Bletchley Park, have been released by GCHQ. The papers, ‘The Applications of Probability to Crypt’, and ‘Paper on the Statistics of Repetitions’, apparently use mathematical analysis to try and determine which are the more likely Enigma settings so that they can be tried as quickly as possible.
The article quotes “a GCHQ mathematician” saying that GCHQ had now “squeezed the juice” out of the two papers and was “happy for them to be released into the public domain”, but that the fact that the contents had been restricted “shows what a tremendous importance it has in the foundations of our subject”. The two papers are now available to view at the National Archives at Kew, west London.
Source: Alan Turing papers on code breaking released by GCHQ.
Introducing The Aperiodical
You may have noticed a new look here on Travels in a Mathematical World. For a while this blog was designed to look like a page from my website peterrowlett.net, but now it is different. This is because I have joined Katie Steckles and Christian Perfect in a collaborative blogging endeavour we’re calling The Aperiodical.
A launch post over at The Aperiodical says
The Aperiodical is a new maths magazine/blog aimed at people interested in mathematics who want to read stuff. We post news stories related to maths, opinion pieces, interesting things we’ve found, accounts of monthly MathsJams, maths videos, and feature articles, as well as posts from our own blogs. We also host the Carnival of Mathematics, a monthly blogging carnival.
We’ve picked today to launch as it is the anniversary of Felix Klein’s birth, and we offer some shiny Klein goodies to get started. Matt Parker and Katie Steckles investigate the amazing surface which bears his name in a video ‘Top N Facts about the Klein Bottle‘.
This got us wondering – what did Klein do apart from that ever famous bottle? Christian, Katie and I investigated and found an interesting career both in research mathematics and other contributions to the discipline, including excellent teaching, editorship of a famous journal and encyclopaedia, acting on a strong interest in school teaching and promoting mathematics to the general public. We wrote up what we found in ‘Klein: outside the bottle‘.
But we aren’t just writing our own posts on the site. We’re also keen to publish reports, exposition, videos, or anything mathematical and interesting that you want to share. Recently we’ve carried interesting pieces by Andrew Taylor offering an application of Grime Dice to electoral reform (as heard on the BBC’s Material World) and Paul Taylor on how he devised the Hilbert’s Space-Filling Crossword on our Features feed. If you’d like to write something please get in touch.
You can find out more about the approach we’re taking with The Aperiodical, view pages and get RSS feeds for all our different types of post, and much more by reading the launch post: The Aperiodical.