Having gathered a few data points about people’s availability for the recreational maths seminar, and heavily weighted towards my own, it looks like weekend evenings are the most convenient times for everyone to get together for the recreational maths seminar. So, let’s say 7pm GMT on Sunday evening, the 11th of November. That’s 2pm EST (New York), 11am PST (California) and 6am EDT (Eastern Australia, on the 12th of November).
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Newcastle MathsJam October 2012 Recap
I’ve posted my recollections of what happened at last month’s Newcastle MathsJam over at my mathem-o-blog.
Follow Friday, 2/11/12
Since the date is palindromic, and the weekday starts with an F, it’s time for another instalment of Follow Friday! Here’s some people I recommend following if you’re on Twitter, and some enjoyable tweets/links for you to look at if not.
Carnival of Mathematics 92
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of October, is now online at White Group Mathematics.
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.
A recreational maths seminar?
Would you be interested in taking part in a sort of online video-chat seminar about recreational maths? Then read on!
Factor Conga
Quite a few designery visualisations of the prime numbers have been put out on the web recently, to varying degrees of success. Most of the time they look pretty but don’t tell you very much; the most recent example I can think of is El Patrón de los Números Primos by Jason Davies.
A few weeks ago Brent Yorgey posted on his excellent blog The Math Less Traveled some really nice “factorization diagrams“, along with the code to produce them. Straight away, anyone with a text editor and a knack for fancy web coding set to work making the animated version that was so clearly required.
Stephen von Worley has made, I think, the nicest one. He calls it the Factor Conga. Sit back and enjoy the mysteries of the natural numbers as they dance their beguiling dance!
Interesting Esoterica Spooky Halloween Edition
Today is Halloween, the day when skeletons and spooks and statisticians ((While The Aperiodical is an equal opportunity employer, the author maintains a legitimate fear of “approximate counting”)) roam the earth to wreak their awful revenge on the innocent.
Maths has a habit of borrowing peculiar words from the vernacular, so I thought I’d go on a witch-hunt in the arXiv and see what bone-chilling titles I could find. Here’s what fell into my genuine recreation Ghostbusters Ghost Trap:
Limiting Risk by Turning Manifest Phantoms into Evil Zombies
On the effect of ghost force in the quasicontinuum method: dynamic problems in one dimension
Taming the Ghost in Pais-Uhlenbeck Oscillator
Recovering Missing Slices of the Discrete Fourier Transform using Ghosts
An algebraic approach to laying a ghost to rest
Conclusion: mathematicians ain’t afraid of no ghosts.
Have you got any blood-curdling paper titles to share around the campfire?