I’ve posted my recollections of what happened at last month’s Newcastle MathsJam over at my mathem-o-blog.
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Cardboard SKI calculus
I had a spare day yesterday so, rather than clean my house, I made a model of the SKI combinator calculus out of a pizza box.
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZQMmgElRMI]
Using Computer Modern on the web
Computer Modern is the family of typefaces developed by Donald Knuth for TeX. It’s so good-looking that some scientists do research just so they can write it up in Computer Modern.
I love TeX and everybody knows it, so I was pretty delighted to hear that the cm-unicode project compiles versions of the Computer Modern fonts in a few formats, including TTF. Having the fonts in TTF format means you can use them in non-TeX environments, in particular on the web.
I’ve run the cm-unicode fonts through codeandmore’s @font-face kit generator to get all the weird formats that the various browsers insist on. The result is a set of packages containing everything you need to use the Computer Modern typefaces on the web.
I’ve put up a page containing examples of each face in use and links to the packages. Enjoy!
David’s de Bruijn sequence card trick
A few days ago, my friend David asked me if I could help him with a card trick. I said I could, hence this post. I managed to pin David down in front of my camera long enough for him to demonstrate the trick; a full explanation follows this video:
Carnival of Mathematics 88
Better late than never, here’s the 88th Carnival of Mathematics. As an editor of The Aperiodical, I’ve been press-ganged into interrupting my holiday to write this month’s edition.
Before I start with the real submissions, I think I’ll abuse this bully pulpit to link to some of my recent blogging efforts. I found each letter’s favourite words, recorded a video proving a nice fact about grids of fibonacci numbers, and wrote an Aperiodical Round Up. I also wrote a jQuery and WordPress plugin to give blog commentors instant previews of LaTeX in their comments. You can try that in the comments section here, if you’d like.
Continue reading “Carnival of Mathematics 88” on cp’s mathem-o-blog
Instant MathJax preview of LaTeX typed into HTML textareas
I’ve completely rewritten my write maths, see maths library to be a little jQuery plugin that attaches itself to editable areas on pages, like contenteditable elements, textareas, and input boxes. When your cursor is inside some LaTeX, a little preview box appears just above it with the LaTeX rendered through MathJax. I’ve made a demo page on GitHub, and the code itself is available there too.
Continue reading “Instant MathJax preview of LaTeX typed into HTML textareas” on cp’s mathem-o-blog
A huggermuggering nonannouncement of an overinvolved knickknack
It’s odd, the process of waking up. Sometimes you can get out of bed and stumble around for an hour or two, maybe even get dressed and go to work, before your brain does anything to differentiate you from a patient in a highly mobile vegetative state. On other days it seems that your mental starter motor catches on the first try and before you’ve even opened your eyes all sorts of brilliantly original thoughts are competing for attention.
Today is one of those days. As I swung my big long legs out of bed the thought occurred to me that the word “cheese” has an awful lot of Es in it.