This month saw a record high turnout, requiring as many as three tables being pushed together, a whole bag of maltesers and a tin of shortbread someone got for Christmas and hadn’t eaten yet. We also had one new attendee who had previously been a regular at Newcastle MathsJam, and has now moved to Manchester for a PhD. Not that it’s a competition or anything, but in your face Newcastle. In fact, the turnout was so large that I couldn’t even keep track of everything that was going on, and when I collected in all the scrap paper I found people had written down several things I wasn’t aware we talked about, including the method for cube rooting large numbers used by Maths Busking.
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- Nottingham: Peter has everyone where he wants them in a game of Mad Abel
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- Nottingham: Peter teaching new victims Mad Abel
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- Nottingham: Mike Black is building a pyramid from four identical pieces… or not, in fact
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- Nottingham: Playing the ZAG crossword from IMA Mathematics Today. 7 down is prime, 4 across is square, etc.
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- Nottingham: Mike did it! A pyramid!
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- Nottingham: playing with Kit Yates/Marcus du Sautoy/Dara O Briain’s Radio Times puzzle page
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- Manchester’s arty tantrix photo
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- Manchester: a numbers puzzle
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- Manchester: A game of Perudo has occurred. We notice the dice on the box diagram are all wrong.
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- Newcastle: tiling hyperbolic space with heptagons
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- Newcastle: Steven has mastered making buckyball heptagons, so we have another model of hyperbolic space
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- Newcastle: a buckyball Loch Ness monster!
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- Newcastle: a rolling cube puzzle from www.mathpuzzle.com.
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- Dorset plays Qwirkle!
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- Möbius bagels at Cardiff Maths Jam
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- Cambridge: the puzzle table
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- A geometry problem at Cambridge MathsJam
Manchester MathsJam Recap, August 2012
This month was a small group, but MathsJam is serious business so we got through loads of fun in the time allotted for fun. To start with, we hacked away at Leeds’ tweeted starter for ten:
LDS : As I am alone, starting w/ simple one ; don’t know the answer yet.Is it possible to cut unit square into 3 triangles w/ areas in GP?
— Maths Jam (@MathsJam) August 21, 2012
Maths Jam July 2012 – Paper Enigma
Having discovered this wonderful design for a paper Enigma machine, which uses a standard size crisp tube and does a pretty good job of encoding things like an Enigma machine, I decided it was worth trying it out. What better opportunity to use something which can encode secret messages than to send messages between two monthly Maths Jam events via the medium of Twitter? The public sending of the messages would be incomprehensible to anyone not willing to get their hands dirty with a crisp tube and scissors. Unless they’ve got an actual Enigma machine.
Manchester MathsJam July 2012 Recap
This month we had two new attendees, as well as some regulars. We talked about lots of different things, although one recurring theme was the Crisp Tube Enigma machine, which we were using to send coded messages to Newcastle MathsJam. There will shortly be a video chronicling our achievements, and I’ll post a link to the video and writeup here once it’s ready.
MathsJam Annual Conference 2012 booking now open
Booking is now open for the 2012 MathsJam annual conference. As well as being a regular monthly event in pubs all over the UK and the world, MathsJam has an annual gathering on a weekend in November, where attendees enjoy lightning 5-minute talks, long coffee breaks and general mathematical hanging out – as well as MathsJam’s standard “puzzles, games, problems, and sharing fun stuff with like-minded self-confessed maths enthusiasts”.
This year, the conference will take place at Wychwood Park, near Crewe, on the weekend of 17th-18th November 2012. The Aperiodical editorial team will almost certainly be in attendance, so watch this space for details of the exciting things we have planned for the weekend.
Places cost £165 for one person or £250 for two people for the whole weekend, with discounts for the unemployed, the early, and those who don’t need a room at the conference park.
More information: MathsJam 2012.
Manchester MathsJam June 2012 Recap
Having been absent from the May MathsJam, I have been promised a writeup by Manchester MathsJam regular and sometime Aperiodical article-writer Andrew Taylor. This has not yet arrived, and in the interests of making things as temporally confusing as possible, I’m going to post the June writeup now and let that one happen whenever it happens.
June’s MathsJam coincided with one of England’s games in the Euro Football Time 2012 Soccer Cup, or whatever it’s called, but luckily the pub we use for our MathsJams is one of the few locations in Manchester not showing the game, and instead we were treated to some live jazz from the other room.
MathsJam April 2012 Photos
If you’ve taken a picture at a MathsJam and you’d like to share it, please submit it to our tumblr.