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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.

Reframe by Adam Scales, Pierre Berthelomeau, Paul van den Berg.