[vimeo url=http://vimeo.com/39792837]
Spherikal by Ion
[vimeo url=http://vimeo.com/39792837]
Spherikal by Ion
Paul Taylor wanted an easy way to write some maths he could take a screengrab of, for use as an icon. Before I intervened he was doing something unnatural with wikipedia, so I wrote a little applet using MathJax: “make big maths“.
Quite a few tools like this exist, using mimetex or some other CGI tool to run LaTeX on a server and produce an image file. That’s far too slow and rubbish-looking for my liking, so I made my own with MathJax.
Continue reading “A little applet to make maths for screengrabbing” on cp’s mathem-o-blog
This is the platonic ideal of an entry in my Interesting Esoterica collection: two scientists from Kobe University and one from UWE’s excellently-named International Center of Unconventional Computing have written a paper, Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate, claiming that swarms of soldier crabs Mictyris guinotae can be persuaded to act as logic gates, from which a universal computer could be built. The paper first describes how they modelled swarms of crabs, then how the logic gates are implemented, and ends with data from an experiment with real soldier crabs. The AND gate worked about two thirds of the time, which isn’t bad.
It looks like this paper is a follow-up to the earlier work, Slime mould logical gates: exploring ballistic approach, which did basically the same thing on a smaller scale. I can only think that the next step must be to use humans.
I’ve given a talk about other unlikely computing machines: I can’t believe it’s a universal computer!
(via Slashdot)
Much has been made on Twitter of the recent list from CareerCast.com and posted at the Wall Street Journal of the 200 “Best and Worst Jobs of 2012” (a tweet on this from the IMA has been retweeted over fifty times). The reason? Mathematician is in the top ten, at number ten in fact.
There are a few issues with this, such as the simple question: what is a mathematician? If you take this to mean academic mathematician then this is a fairly specialist, niche area with few options for most graduates. Wider than this, there aren’t many jobs called “Mathematician”. I used to have the equivalent result from 2009, when mathematician was top of the list, in my IMA careers talk. The Wall Street Journal article then featured a mathematician working on 3D graphics behind Hollywood movies. I’m not sure she’s who you think of when you hear “mathematician”. Either way, I’m left wondering precisely what this job “mathematician” is and how realistic an option it is for most mathematics graduates.
I also wonder about the methodology, explained in detail at CareerCast.com but based in part on fairly subjective values. You might wonder, with mathematician (#10) and jobs that could be taken by maths graduates such as those in computing (#1, #9), actuary (#2) and financial planner (#5) at the top of the list, and lumberjack (#200), dairy farmer (#199), soldier (#198) and oil rig worker (#197) at the bottom, whether mathematician is benefiting too much from being a low-risk, indoors job.
Another issue is consistency. Between being first in 2009 and tenth in 2012, mathematician was sixth in 2010 and second in 2011. Have these jobs changed so much in the four years the survey has taken place or is there so little between the top candidate careers that minor variations are exaggerated?
Perhaps I should just be happy that mathematician is a top ten job and not worry about these niggles. Of course, if mathematician weren’t in the top ten then we wouldn’t pay the survey any notice so perhaps that’s bias enough without questioning how the flattering result came about.
Or, in similarly simplified headlinese, “Math finds the best doughnut”. A little bit more precisely, Fernando C. Marques and André Neves claim in a preprint on the arXiv to have proved the Willmore conjecture, that the minimum achievable mean curvature of a torus is $\frac{2}{\pi^2}$.
The article I linked to is some surprisingly non-stupid coverage from the Huffington Post. It seems they have a maths professor writing a column. I will never understand that site. I don’t know if there’s a Serious Business way of framing this, but the result is nice to know.
Richard Elwes has written a very short post on Google+ with some more real-maths information about what’s going on.
[vimeo url=http://vimeo.com/37796909]
Look at the fluid dynamics!