Welcome to the 89th Carnival of Mathematics, this month hosted here at The Aperiodical. While The Aperiodical team is involved in administrating the Carnival (more information about the Carnival can be found here), it is hosted on a different blog each month. Last month cp’s mathem-o-blog was the host for Carnival of Mathematics 88, and next month the Carnival will be hosted by Mike Croucher at Walking Randomly.
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The Mathematician’s Shirts
Patches ready to sew
The shirt symbolizes the formality of a male-dominated society and of conformance to society’s rules. Mathematics, too, is a realm of formality and rules populated largely by men. Yet in both shirts and mathematics there is room for creativity and individuality.
In The Mathematician’s Shirt project, artist Madeleine Shepherd and mathematician Julia Collins set about challenging these notions by turning a collection of formal shirts (donated by mathematicians!) into mathematical art. Inspired by the work of mathematicians in Edinburgh, the fabric of the shirts got twisted into 4-dimensional shapes, woven into knots and stitched into different geometries.
A New Math Guide to the Olympics by Craig Damrauer
Reflect on the summer’s sport with some fun nonsense equations by writer Craig Damrauer. You need to click on the box to set each clip going.
Puzzlebomb – August 2012
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 8 of Puzzlebomb, for August 2012, can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 8 – August 2012
The solutions to Issue 8 can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 8 – August 2012 – Solutions
Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
Mathematics: a culture of historical inaccuracy?
Earlier this year, back when I somehow managed to find time to write blog posts (sorry!), I wrote a couple of pieces on incorrect but oft-repeated stories in history of mathematics, basically describing some issues and expressing my frustration. These were Apparently Gauss got in this bar fight with Hilbert… and Why do we enjoy maths history misconceptions?
Today Thony Christie wrote on Twitter (as @rmathematicus) with a link to this post by Dennis Des Chene (aka “Scaliger”): On bad anecdotes and good fun. As Thony points out, this is an “excellent piece of maths history myth busting” and I am writing this quick note to commend you to read it.
Maths Jam July 2012 – Paper Enigma
Having discovered this wonderful design for a paper Enigma machine, which uses a standard size crisp tube and does a pretty good job of encoding things like an Enigma machine, I decided it was worth trying it out. What better opportunity to use something which can encode secret messages than to send messages between two monthly Maths Jam events via the medium of Twitter? The public sending of the messages would be incomprehensible to anyone not willing to get their hands dirty with a crisp tube and scissors. Unless they’ve got an actual Enigma machine.
Manchester MathsJam July 2012 Recap
This month we had two new attendees, as well as some regulars. We talked about lots of different things, although one recurring theme was the Crisp Tube Enigma machine, which we were using to send coded messages to Newcastle MathsJam. There will shortly be a video chronicling our achievements, and I’ll post a link to the video and writeup here once it’s ready.