The Aperiodical 

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Open Season – Singmaster’s Conjecture

By Katie Steckles. Posted January 29, 2013

Science and maths are all about finding things out. Mathematics in particular is about making statements, and then determining their truth (or falsity). Finding a proof, or disproof, of a mathematical theory can be as simple as finding a counterexample, or it can take hundreds of authors tens of thousands of pages.

In this short series of articles, I’m going to write about some mathematical questions we don’t know the answer to – which haven’t yet been proven or disproven. Hopefully you will find it interesting, and maybe someone will even be inspired to delve deeper and find the answers themselves.

Geometric animated GIFs by Paolo Čerić

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted January 27, 2013



Paolo Čerić is an information processing student from Croatia. He’s developed a cool style of animated geometrical GIFs created using processing, which he posts on his Tumblr blog.

via Colossal

Log-log! Who’s there? Not a power law!

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted January 26, 2013



This is a story about a particularly awful bit of science reporting. It’s taken me a while to sort out what’s going on. First I thought it was bad maths, then I thought it was bad science, and now I think it might be bad journalism. But it might be none, all, some, or a superset of those. I didn’t really want to write this post because crowing about other people’s apparent failures isn’t great, but we took a team decision to cover it because of entertainment reasons. ((Unlike the BBC, we are not funded in a unique way, so we have no public service remit. I think that’s right.)) I’m going to make an attempt to tell you what I’ve found, a little bit of what I think, and then we can rejoin Team Positive Mental Attitude when it’s all over.

Submergence01 by Squidsoup

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted January 25, 2013

[vimeo url=http://vimeo.com/57412634]

Submergence01, by Squidsoup.

via NotCot.org

This is an ex-parrot. ‘Is plumage has dimension 1

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted January 25, 2013



A paper by Lorenzo Pérez-Rodríguez, Roger Jovani and François Mougeot in Proceedings B, “Fractal geometry of a complex plumage trait reveals bird’s quality“, claims that the measurement of the fractal dimension of a red-legged partridge’s chest plumage is a good indicator of its health.

I know what you’re thinking: another ‘non-mathematicians pick trendy term to describe something rather different’ story, but actually the authors do quite a good job of explaining and justifying their method. I’m convinced!

Plumage patterns are the product of reaction-diffusion systems which probably don’t really produce fractal dimension, but the researchers needed a fairly easy and consistent way of measuring the complexity of patterns. A healthy bird can produce more melanin, which can produce more complicated patterns. For the level of detail needed, the researchers say that the box-counting method of computing fractal dimension is a quick way of measuring the effect they’re looking for.

Paper: Fractal geometry of a complex plumage trait reveals bird’s quality, by Lorenzo Pérez-Rodríguez, Roger Jovani and François Mougeot, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

via Slashdot

Art by Owen Schuh

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted January 24, 2013



Manchester MathsJam January 2013 Recap

By Katie Steckles. Posted January 23, 2013

The first MathsJam of the year was well attended. Despite not being on our usual table (there was no jazz band on this week, so we were allowed a bigger table further into the pub) everyone found us ok, and a few people brought baked goods – always a precursor to an excellent MathsJam.

We started off with some quick mental arithmetic brainteasers: how many straight cuts do you need to make to slice a flat square cake into 196 equally sized square pieces? Several people got the answer quite quickly, while others tried to cheat by stacking cake pieces and moving them around between cuts. No cheating!