### James Grime’s house-building problem

Aperiodipal James Grime has put a new video on his YouTube channel. He’s got a problem to do with building houses:

I was involved, that’s what! The puzzle can be done on pen and paper but it involves a lot of drawing and calculating, so James asked if anyone could make a computery version. I spent my day off work last week making just such a thing: the computerised Building Houses Problem.

### Everyone’s a mathematician

This morning Katie and I had a little discussion about house style on The Aperiodical. Mathematican Paul Taylor was listed as “Mathematician Paul Taylor” in the blurb for his featured post. I posited that everyone published here is a mathematician, so the “Mathematician” title is redundant.

This of course resulted in me writing a userscript which automatically prepends every name on the page with the honorific “Mathematician”.

### Integer sequence review: A193430

The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences contains over 200,000 sequences. It contains classics, curios, thousands of derivatives entered purely for completeness’s sake, short sequences whose completion would be a huge mathematical achievement, and some entries which are just downright silly.

For a lark, David and I have decided to review some of the Encyclopedia’s sequences. We’re rating sequences on four axes: NoveltyAestheticsExplicability and Completeness.

This is the triumphant return of the integer sequence reviews!

#### A193430 Primes p such that p+1 is in A055462.

23, 6911, 5944066965503999, ...

### Babbage’s difference engine is really, really pretty

Hands up if you knew there was a working replica of Babbage’s difference engine in California.

(My hand is not up.)

This glorious machine lives in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. A company called xRez Studio, which specialises in taking extremely high resolution gigapixel photos of things, has taken some extremely high resolution gigapixel photos of the difference engine. They’re so lovely that it feels wrong to be looking at them at work.

### A morning in the office with CP and Cushing

CP walks into the office.

Cushing: Christian, look at this. I’ve asked Wolfram Alpha to plot a quadratic going through three squares.

### Newcastle MathsJam second half of 2013 recap

Well! I have been quite remiss in writing up the Newcastle MathsJams. The last recap published was for May’s meeting. The end of the year (and associated holiday) is a good time to kick myself up the backside and do the entire second half of the year in one go. So, here’s that.