Having been absent for last month’s MathsJam, I was keen to have a great time this month so I prepared some nice Easter-based things (since this is the nearest MathsJam to Easter). I thought about egg-shapes, and how to construct them, and came up with a few fun things. The turnout was huge (at its peak, 21+ε: one attendee was expecting) and we spread out over three tables.
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Interesting Esoterica Summation, volume 6
Cor, it’s been longer than I thought since I last did one of these. I’ve been happily collecting esoterica for months, thinking I didn’t have enough new stuff to do a summation. It turns out I’ve got 22 new things! Better get cracking with the interest and the summing.
In case you’re new to this: every now and then I encounter a paper or a book or an article that grabs my interest but isn’t directly useful for anything. It might be about some niche sub-sub-subtopic I’ve never heard of, or it might talk about something old from a new angle, or it might just have a funny title. I put these things in my Interesting Esoterica collection on Mendeley. And then when I’ve gathered up enough, I collect them here.
In this post the titles are links to the original sources, and I try to add some interpretation or explanation of why I think each thing is interesting below the abstract.
Some things might not be freely available, or even available for a reasonable price. Sorry.
Karma by Do Ho Suh
via NotCot.org
Newcastle MathsJam January & February 2013 recaps
I’ve finally finally got round to writing up my notes from the last two Newcastle MathsJams, over at my mathem-o-blog.
Open Season – The Perfect Cuboid
In this short series of articles, I’m writing about mathematical questions we don’t know the answer to – which haven’t yet been proven or disproven. This is the second article in the series, and considers a less well-known variant on an extremely well-known problem.
Ask anyone to name a theorem, and they’ll probably come up with one of the really famous ones, like Pythagoras’ theorem. This super-handy hypotenuse fact states that for a triangle with sides A, B and C, where the angle between A and B is a right angle, we have $C^2 = A^2 + B^2$. This leads us on to a nice bit of stamp-collecting – there are infinitely many triples of integers, A, B and C, which fit this equation, called Pythagorean Triples.
One well-known generalisation of this is to change the value $2$ to larger values, and go looking for triples satisfying $C^n = A^n + B^n$. But don’t – Andrew Wiles spent a good chunk of his life on proving that you can’t, for any value of $n>2$, find any such triples. The statement was originally made by Pierre De Fermat, and while Fermat famously didn’t write down a proof, it was the last of his mathematical statements to be gifted one – hence the name ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’ – and proving it took over 350 years.
Carnival of Mathematics 96
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of February, is now online at Math Mama Writes.
The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. For more information about the Carnival of Mathematics, click here.
Puzzlebomb – March 2013
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 15 of Puzzlebomb, for March 2013, can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 15 – March 2013
The solutions to Issue 15 can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 15 – March 2013 – Solutions
Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.