The IMA have announced a competition connected to the 54th British Applied Mathematics Colloquium (BAMC) which took place last month at University College London. Four prizes of £100 are available for the best reports of between 500 and 1,500 words by attendees at the recent BAMC who are students or completed their PhDs within the past five years. You are encouraged to write about a talk you have seen or your experience of being at BAMC. Further details are given on the IMA website at: Win a £100 prize!
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Maths Busking enters university outreach & public engagement competition
Maths Busking has been entered for ‘Engage U’, a “European Competition for Best Innovations in University Outreach and Public Engagement”. A detailed entry makes the case for Maths Busking, including the following description:
Maths Busking aims to show the public the surprising and fascinating side of mathematics through the medium of street performance.
The EngageU competition seeks:
to identify the most innovative outreach and public engagement activities that have been carried out by European Universities. We define outreach and public engagement in the broadest sense to incorporate all forms of interaction with individuals and organisations outside the university… The three winning entries will each receive a 5000 EUR prize for their institution… The three winners will be announced on 23 April 2012.
As well as being a competition, “all entries will be made public on the website, forming part of an online repository of good practice in outreach”.
You are encouraged to vote for entries and no registration is needed to do so.
A full list of entries, rules and further information is available via the EngageU website.
Minds of Modern Mathematics iPad App
Much is being made on Twitter of the IBM Minds of Modern Mathematics App. Okay if you have an iPad, I suppose. According to Wired, this:
presents an interactive timeline of the history of mathematics and its impact on society from 1000 to 1960… The app is based on an original, 50-foot-long “Men of Modern Mathematics” installation created in 1964 by Charles and Ray Eames. Minds of Modern Mathematics users can view a digitized version of the original infographic as well as browse through an interactive timeline with more than 500 biographies, math milestones and images of relevant artifacts.
Wikipedia explains that Men of Modern Mathematics was connected with the exhibit Mathematica: A World of Numbers… and Beyond, originally in the new science wing of the California Museum of Science and Industry. According to the Eames Office, “committed to communicating, preserving, and extending the legacy and work of Charles and Ray Eames” who designed the exhibit, Mathematica was “intended to enlighten the amateur without embarrassing the specialist”.
Wikipedia has this to say of the Men of Modern Mathematics poster:
In 1966, five years after the opening of the Mathematica Exhibit, IBM published a 2-by-12-foot (0.61 × 3.7 m) timeline poster—titled “Men of Modern Mathematics”—based on the items displayed on the exhibit’s History Wall, and distributed free copies to academics. The timeline covers the period from 1000 AD to approximately 1950 AD, and the poster has biographical and historical items along with numerous pictures showing progress in various areas of science, including architecture.
You can view still images of the poster at the Computer History Museum website.
iPad App: Minds of Modern Mathematics.
Wired: New IBM App Presents Nearly 1,000 Years of Math History.
Short, short sci fi #TBSFA
I’m not one for producing creative writing but yesterday, thanks to James Clare, I came across a fun idea: the BSFA Tweetfiction Tweetstream challenge. There are bunch of rules on the website but basically it’s an original piece of sci-fi or fantasy fiction contained within a tweet with the hashtag #TBSFA. Check out attempts by doing a Twitter search for #TBSFA.
I felt an attempt should be a contained, whole story (premise to resolution). The much Retweeted example is by @steven_moffat, current head writer of Doctor Who:
The worm became an idea, which hid itself in words, until it could climb, devouring all, through the eye of the reader of this tweet. #TBSFA
— Steven Moffat (@steven_moffat) April 6, 2012
This is good because something is set up (the worm that became an idea and hid in words) and happens (it climbs through the eye of the reader) within the tweet. Even though you don’t know where the worm came from or what results from it being in your eye, I feel that this has structure. Some of the tweets I’ve seen are more like snippets. Many are making creative use of language but they lack either the establishment of a premise or its resolution, or sometimes both. I don’t want to pick on a particular example so I’ve made one up:
The monster was only inches away as I cowered. I needed to run away but somehow I couldn’t make my legs start working again. #TBSFA
You don’t know what the scenario is, where the monster came from, or what happened in the end. Crucially, nothing happens. Perhaps it’s fun to fill in these details (arbitrarily) yourself but I think then the story hasn’t really done its job. A really good example, in my view, is this that I saw this morning by @mjkirkham:
As the soldiers were kicking down my door, I clicked ‘Unlike’ on the Emperor’s profile page. Rebellion felt good. :) #TBSFA
— Mark Kirkham (@mjkirkham) April 7, 2012
In a few short words this conjures a world, an event happening within it and makes something happen. So much is evoked that isn’t said. We imagine an Orwellian society with extreme, state-controlled social networking. Our hero has disobeyed, been caught and now manages one final act of rebellion before being taken away by the state. In a few short words, you are led to invent an entire story.
Given that the medium was Twitter, I felt acknowledging this by writing a piece of Twitter dialogue was appropriate. You may be aware of the process of commenting on a Retweet (RT, to tweet again someone’s message, with attribution). There are various methods for this but I favour putting a comment in front of the RT, so this would look like this: “Message in reply RT @firstuser Original message”. Although this means the tweet needs reading backwards it removes any ambiguity over who said which portion. Because of the need to have a complete story I decided to structure a three stage tweet: “First user responds to query RT @seconduser Second user queries original message RT @firstuser Original message”.
Anyway, here is my attempt:
Said he was fed up of people asking RT @tim Did he really have a proof? RT @peterrowlett 1st trip in new time machine, to meet Fermat #TBSFA
— Peter Rowlett (@peterrowlett) April 6, 2012
With such a small number of characters in which to tell a story it seemed sensible to appeal to a cliche or two. I tried to hint at a world in which time travel is commonplace (the first tweet reports getting a “new time machine”, not inventing one, and ‘@tim’* doesn’t seem surprised), and consequently history is overloaded with time travellers (Fermat is tired of the question yet his Last Theorem wasn’t known until after his death, when it was discovered by his son in the margin of his copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica; he must, therefore, be being bothered by visitors from the future), with the implication of consequent issues for causality.
I chose the issue of whether Fermat actually had a proof, or simply felt he saw one and didn’t check the details, as a suitably unanswerable question. (Given that Fermat’s conjecture is correct,) Without travelling back in time and asking Fermat to write out the details of his proof (how do you broach that question without breaking causality?), we cannot really know the answer.
I like this idea of having such a short space to bring forth an idea. I hope you like my attempt. I encourage you to have a go. (You’re supposed to do it by midnight Tuesday to enter a competition, but perhaps it would be fun anyway!)
* I didn’t realise until after I’d sent my tweet that there is actually a user @tim! I meant to check and forgot. I just wanted a short name so it didn’t take too many characters, and there’s a whole tim-time thing. Thankfully @tim’s most recent tweet says he is logging off Twitter for a month, and he has so many followers hopefully he won’t see and be confused by my apparently putting words in his mouth!
Math/Maths 91: Gathering for Gardner 10
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released.
A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. First Samuel and Peter were joined by special guest Edmund Harriss to talk about his time at Gathering for Gardner 10 and Five math things to do before you die, then they spoke with eachother about: Snowflake Growth Successfully Modeled from Physical Laws; A Joint Position Statement of the Mathematical Association of America and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics on Teaching Calculus; All the Math Taught at University Can Be Outsourced. What Now?; Mathematical Fonts; Intersections, Henry Moore and British modernism exhibition; Emmy Noether: The Mighty Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of; Rechner Calculator; Math Awareness Month: Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge; and much more.
Get this episode: Math/Maths 91: Gathering for Gardner 10
‘School Of Hard Sums’ maths gameshow
School Of Hard Sums, the Dara O Briain-fronted maths game show from Dave (based on the Emmy-award nominated Japanese comedy-panel format Comaneci University Mathematics) starts an 8 episode run 16th April at 8pm on Dave. A page at the British Comedy Guide says:
Showing how maths underpins everything in the world around us, each programme sees two main problems for Dara to crack using numbers and equations, while a second comedian attempts a solution with more physical methods. To discover how many different people to date before choosing a partner, Dara uses the Optimal Stopping Theory; trying to predict a football score, Bayesian statistics come to Dara’s rescue.
Source: Dara O Briain: School Of Hard Sums.
Third IMA Virtual Branch talk: ‘Dissections – highlights from a masterclass’ by Bernard Murphy
The IMA has a series of online talks. The third in this series will be ‘Dissections – highlights from a masterclass’ by Bernard Murphy on Thursday 10th May 2012 starting at 7 pm. The following information is available on attending this:
This is to be the third IMA virtual branch talk and will take place in an online classroom.
To join the session navigate your internet browser to: http://bit.ly/IMAVirtualTalk3
It could take a few minutes to get into the online room the first time, so you may wish to either try earlier in the day, or come a little before 7 pm. If you are unable to access the site, then click on the ‘Support’ link in the top right corner of the webpage.No charge is made to attend meetings; non-IMA members are welcome.