[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S530Vwa33G0]
A mesmerising tour through fractal space. Switch to fullscreen HD if you can. Created with Mandelbulb3D
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Foldable Dodecahedron Calendar made in LaTeX
If anyone still hasn’t sorted themselves out with a calendar for 2013 – come on people, it’s February! – there’s a nice example of one here. It’s a dodecahedron which, once assembled, you can presumably orient to display the correct month (or the incorrect month, if you’re an impish sort).
The best thing about it for fans of LaTeX (the majestic mathematical markup language of kings) is that this thing is written entirely in LaTeX, using the TikZ package to create the graphics.
Download: PDF and TeX files, as well as all necessary packages, are available from TeXample.net.
(If you can’t compile the calendar yourself and want an up-to-date version, click on the Open in writeLaTeX link).
Crimewaves really are waves – but they can be stopped
Nothing puts your home insurance premium up like having been burgled in the past – because it means you’re more likely to be burgled again. Stanford researcher Nancy Rodríguez, with colleagues Henri Berestycki (who is first author, for the record) and Lenya Ryzhik, has developed a travelling waves model to explain this phenomenon – and, more importantly, how to stop it.
Crime, according to past research, tends to cluster in particular neighbourhoods – and even individual houses. Once a crime epicentre has been established, criminal activity tends to spread out in a wave pattern, gradually engulfing larger and larger areas.
Talk: Computability of Bass-Serre structures in the Grzegorczyk hierarchy
I’m going to abuse this here organ of mine ((phrasing?!?!)) to show off a thing I did yesterday.
My chum the inimitable David Cushing has started a postgrad pure maths seminar at Newcastle. Because there are only a few pure postgrads here, he asked me to give a talk about the stuff I was looking at for the PhD I gave up on last year.
The title of the talk was “Computability of Bass-Serre structures in the Grzegorczyk hierarchy”. It gave an outline of everything needed to show that the fundamental group of a graph of groups is computable in a level of the Grzegorczyk hierarchy at most one higher than its constituent parts, and what that means.
The slides, a recording of the talk, and a link to my presentation template are in a post on my mathem-o-blog: Talk: Computability of Bass-Serre structures in the Grzegorczyk hierarchy
‘Of little practical value’?
Some mathematics, pictured here being hard to illustrate in news coverage
As the heady excitement of the dawn of a forty-eight-Mersenne-prime world dims to a subdued, albeit slightly less factorable, normality, I have taken the opportunity to see what we can learn about the British press’s attitude and ability when it comes to the reporting of big numbers ending in a 1.
Overseas readers may not be aware that the UK’s public service broadcaster, the BBC, is funded by a mandatory annual £145.50 tax on all television-owning households. Therefore, it would be disappointing if some of these funds were not channeled into reporting the discovery in at least five or six separately-produced broadcasts across the organisation’s various radio and television outlets.
Carnival of Mathematics 95
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of November, is now online at Maths Fact. The post is in Spanish, but can be translated into English using Google Translate.
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.
Rock Paper Squiggles
We’ve seen non-transitive dice, and we’ve had cellular automata coming out of our ears (and proceeding deterministically). Now, this:
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4cV0nCIZoc]
A post by the CA’s creator describes in more detail what’s going on, although essentially the idea is that red, green and blue are able to destroy each other in a similar way to rock-paper-scissors, and the result of letting them play for a while is quite interesting. My favourite YouTube comment here has got to be the amazing and prescient “I’m high and what is this?”