I’ve made another one of my interactive online maths doodads. You should have a go at it right now. It doesn’t require any effort on your part, other than coming up with a positive integer.
You're reading: cp’s mathem-o-blog
Exactly how bad is the 13 times table?
Let’s recite the $13$ times table. Pay attention to the first digit of each number:
\begin{array}{l} \color{blue}13, \\ \color{blue}26, \\ \color{blue}39, \\ \color{blue}52 \end{array}
What happened to $\color{blue}4$‽
A while ago I was working through the $13$ times table for some boring reason, and I was in the kind of mood to find it really quite vexing that the first digits don’t go $1,2,3,4$. Furthermore, $400 \div 13 \approx 31$, so it takes a long time before you see a 4 at all, and that seemed really unfair.
The OEIS now contains 300,000 integer sequences
Are you more likely to be killed by a meteor or to win the lottery?
This tweet from the QI Elves popped up on my Twitter timeline:
The odds of being crushed by a meteor are considerably lower (i.e. more likely) than those of winning the jackpot on the National Lottery.
— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) January 11, 2018
In the account’s usual citationless factoid style, the Elves state that you’re more likely to be crushed by a meteor than to win the jackpot on the lottery.
The replies to this tweet were mainly along the lines of this one from my internet acquaintance Chris Mingay:
Should we not be getting almost weekly stories of people being crushed by a meteor then ?
— Chris Mingay (@GhostMutt) January 11, 2018
Yeah, why don’t we hear about people being squished by interplanetary rocks all the time? I’d tune in to that!
Donald Knuth’s 2017 Christmas lecture: “A Conjecture That Had To Be True”
Every year, Donald Knuth gives a Christmas lecture at Stanford.
This year, he wanted to talk about a conjecture he’s recently investigated.
It’s just over an hour long. Sit down with a warm drink and enjoy some interesting recreational maths from the master.
Scenes at a maths conference
We’re all trying to combat the stereotypes of mathematicians: we try our best to make our work accessible to the public; we wear clean clothes and make eye contact; some of us even had the good sense to be female. But sometimes, the woolly-headed mathematician of legend materialises in his pure form.
Here, in his own words, are a few things that happened at a conference recently attended by one of my friends.
The curious mathmo talks to David Roberts
Way back at the end of last year I put out a call to mathematicians I know: hop on Skype and chat to me for a while about the work you’re doing at the moment. The first person to answer was David Roberts, a pure mathematician from Adelaide.
We had a fascinating talk about one thread of David’s current work, which involves all sorts of objects I know no more about than their names. I had intended to release this as a podcast, but the quality of my recording was very poor and it turns out I’m terrible at audio editing, so instead here’s a transcription. Assume all mistakes are mine, not David’s.
If you’ve ever wanted to know what it’s like to work in the far reaches of really abstract maths, this is an excellent glimpse of it.
DR: I’m David Roberts, I’m a pure mathematician, currently between jobs. I work – as far as research goes – generally on geometry and category theory, and the interplay between those two. And also a little bit of logic stuff, which I thought I’d talk about.