The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of April and hosted by Sophie, is now online at Sophie The Mathmo.
The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.
Recently I came across an interesting idea about little mistakes in counting problems that actually don’t amount to much. In A Problem Squared 030, Matt Parker was investigating the question “What are the odds of having the same child twice?” and made some simplifying assumptions when thinking about DNA combinatorics. He justified leaving out a small number of things when counting an astronomical number of things by going through an example from the lottery.
The current UK lottery uses 59 balls and draws 6 of these, so the one in 45 million figure arises from \(\binom{59}{6}=45,\!057,\!474\), and the probability of winning is a tiny
Matt posits the idea that somewhere along the way we forget to include some tickets.
But let’s say along the way while I’m working it out, for strange reasons I go ‘oh you know what, I’m going to ignore all the options which are all square numbers. You know, I just can’t be bothered including them. Yeah, they’re legitimate lottery tickets, but just to make the maths easier I’m going to ignore them’. And people are getting up in arms, and they’re like ‘you can’t ignore them, they’re real options’.
When teaching moved online due to COVID-19, we had to quickly work out how to deliver our modules online. The main options used to replace in-person classes were:
pre-recorded videos followed by live online tutorials for students to get support while completing exercises;
live online classes offering a mixture of lecturer delivery and student activity.
The first option is good for a module with lots of content delivery, such as when learning new mathematical techniques. In modules with some content delivery but a focus on interaction and discussion, such as mathematical modelling, the second is a good choice.
I felt neither was quite right for my second-year programming module. I opted instead for delivering notes and exercises which students could work through when convenient (which might be in a designed class time or might not) and used my time on the module to write responses to student queries and give feedback on programs written as formative work.
In class students tend to say they’ve done an exercise correctly and because you’re walking round a computer room it can be hard to examine their code in detail. Spending time looking at what they submit as ‘correct’ code in greater detail, it became clear that often there are subtle issues which can be usefully discussed in considered feedback.
Overall, I think this semi-asynchronous delivery was much better use of time and I was able to view more code and give better feedback than I would in-person.
This is part of a special issue of International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology – Takeaways from teaching through a global pandemic – practical examples of lasting value in tertiary mathematics education. There are loads of articles with useful reflections and good ideas that emerged from pandemic teaching.
If you are interested in pandemic literature in higher education teaching and learning, I’m aware of two other journal special issues you might like:
Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in MSOR Connections, a special issue I just edited with Mark Hodds which collects pandemic-related papers from last autumn’s CETL-MSOR Conference.
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of March and hosted by Ben, is now online at Math Off The Grid.
The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.
Earlier today, I tweeted about my exciting new Pi search website, which lets you search for any string of digits within the infinite decimal expansion of π. If you haven’t seen it, go and check it out now.
Following on from the series of ‘Pascal’s Triangle and its Secrets‘ posts, guest author David Benjamin shares another delightful piece of mathematics – this time relating to prime numbers.
At the time of writing the largest known prime number has $24862048$ digits. The number of digits does not reflect the true size of this prime but if we were to type it out at Times New Roman font size 12, it would reach approximately $51.5$ km, or about $32$ miles. Astonishing!
Patrick Laroche from Ocala, Florida discovered this Mersenne prime on December 7, 2018. I was surprised to discover that it’s exponent $82589933$ is the length of the hypotenuse of a primitive Pythagorean triple where $82589933^{2} = 30120165^{2} + 76901708^{2}$ as indeed are 8 of the exponents of those currently ranked from 1 to 10.
The Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria ($\sim$325 BC-265 BC) was arguably the first to prove that there are an infinite number of primes – and since then, people have been searching for new ones. Some do it for kudos, for the prize money, to test the power of computers and the need to find more of the large primes used to help protect the massive amount of data which is being moved around the internet.
Mersenne primes, named after the French monk Marin Mersenne, are of the form $2^{p} -1$, where the exponent $p$ is also prime. Mersenne primes are easier to test for primality, which is one reason we find so many large ones (all but one of the top ten known primes are Mersenne). When Mersenne primes are converted to binary they become a string of $1$s, which makes them suitable for computer algorithms and an excellent starting point for any search.
Since generally testing numbers for primality is slow, some have tried to find methods to produce primes using a formula. Euler’s quadratic polynomial $n^2+n+41$ produces this set of $40$ primes for $n = 0$ to $39$. When $n=40$, the polynomial produces the square number $1681$. Other prime-generating polynomials are listed in this Wolfram Mathworld entry.
The French mathematician LejeuneDirichlet proved that the linear polynomial $a+nb$ will produce an infinite set of primes if $a$ and $b$ are coprime for $n=0,1,2,3,4,…$. Then again, it also produces an infinite number of composite numbers! However, this gem: $224584605939537911 + 1813569659748930n$ produces 27 consecutive primes for $n=0$ to $n=26$ – and of course, all the primes are in arithmetic progression.
14 fruitful fractions
The primes are unpredictable, and become less common as they get larger. Consequently there is no formula that will generate all the prime numbers. However, there is a finite sequence of fractions, that – given an infinite amount of time – would generate all the primes, and in sequential order.
They are the fruitful fractions, created by the brilliant Liverpool-born mathematician, John Horton Conway (1937–2020) who, until his untimely death from complications related to COVID-19, was the John von Neumann Emeritus Professor in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA.
The fruitful fractions are
$\frac{17}{91}$
$\frac{78}{85}$
$\frac{19}{51}$
$\frac{23}{38}$
$\frac{29}{33}$
$\frac{77}{29}$
$\frac{95}{23}$
$\frac{77}{19}$
$\frac{1}{17}$
$\frac{11}{13}$
$\frac{13}{11}$
$\frac{15}{44}$
$\frac{15}{2}$
$\frac{55}{1}$
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
The first time I encountered this set of fractions was in the wonderful book, The Book of Numbers, by Conway and Guy. I was so intrigued as to how Conway came up with his idea, I emailed him to ask. I was delighted to receive an outline of an explanation and even a second set of fractions, neither of which I can now find – it was 1996 and pre-cloud storage! But no worries… Conway explains everything in this lecture, which also demonstrates his passion for mathematics and his ability to express his ideas in a relaxed and humorous way, even when he searches for an error in his proof on 26 minutes. The lecture also includes an introduction to Conway’s computer language, FRACTRAN, which includes the statement:
‘It should now be obvious to you that you can write a one line fraction program that does almost anything, or one and a half lines if you want to be precise‘.
Using the fractions to find prime numbers
Here’s how the fractions are used to generate primes.
Start with the number $2$
Multiply by each of the fourteen fractions until you find one for which the product is an integer
Starting with this new integer, continue multiplying through the fractions until another integer is produced. (If this process reaches fraction $N=\frac{55}{1}$, the integer’s product with N is guaranteed to be another integer as N has a denominator of $1$; the process continues with this new integer being multiplied by fraction A)
Continue multiplying through the set to create more integers
When the integer is a power of $2$, its exponent will be a prime number.
The 19 steps needed to produce the first prime number are:
The successive primes are produced almost like magic – but the number of multiplications needed to produce each new prime becomes larger and larger, and so the method, though wonderfully inventive, is not at all efficient.
Edit: Since this article was first published, the exponent $82589933$ of the Laroche prime has been accepted as the next term in the sequence http://oeis.org/A112634