Hello. I’ve been talked into writing another blog post about my latest puzzle to appear in the Puzzlebomb. Spelling Bees appeared in the May and June issues. The solver is presented with a honeycomb grid containing letters and one bee (of the insect variety; the grid may contain several or no Bs). Their task is to find the two words (or phrases) that can be 
traced along a path through every cell (to use jargon that will be familiar to cruciverbalists and beekeepers alike) in the honeycomb grid. The bee acts as a wild card and will stand for a different letter in both words. The cells which are the first and last letters of each word are shaded to give an extra helping hand.
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Manchester MathsJam June 2012 Recap
Having been absent from the May MathsJam, I have been promised a writeup by Manchester MathsJam regular and sometime Aperiodical article-writer Andrew Taylor. This has not yet arrived, and in the interests of making things as temporally confusing as possible, I’m going to post the June writeup now and let that one happen whenever it happens.
June’s MathsJam coincided with one of England’s games in the Euro Football Time 2012 Soccer Cup, or whatever it’s called, but luckily the pub we use for our MathsJams is one of the few locations in Manchester not showing the game, and instead we were treated to some live jazz from the other room.
Bletchley Park Turing First Day Cover
For my recent birthday I was given a wonderful present: a special UK stamp commemorating Alan Turing, who was born 100 years ago today. The stamp was issued by the Royal Mail not for the Turing centenary but as one of a series of special stamp sets to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
This stamp is particularly special because it is one of 1000 which originated at the Bletchley Park Post Office that were stuck onto a specially designed envelope (Turing, mathematics and patterns) and cancelled on the day the stamp was issued, 23 February 2012, using a special Bombe-themed postmark.
Historical anniversaries: are they worth celebrating?
It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that this year marks 100 years since Alan Turing was born, and that the actual anniversary of his birth is tomorrow. There is massive interest in this fact, both from specialist maths and computing outlets and the mainstream press. What, though, is the significance? You don’t need me to tell you that any anniversary is fairly arbitrary. The earth has gone a whole number of times around the sun since the event (within some margin of error). What, really, does this mean? And attributing special interest to one particular number of anniversaries just because it is a factor of ten or a neat fraction of one hundred is wholly meaningless.
So I don’t fall for anything like that, right? Wrong. For a couple of years now I have been tweeting a link to a biography of a mathematician who was born or died on each date to the Twitter feed @mathshistory on behalf of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. This generates some interest and I am delighted when it does so.
So can I justify anniversaries as having some tremendous significance or is this all just a cynical attempt to grab attention? To a great extent it is the latter. BSHM have a charitable aim to “promote and develop for the public benefit, awareness, knowledge, study and teaching of the history of mathematics”. If anniversaries are going to generate greater awareness of and interest in history, then I’m in.
For the daily tweeting I rely entirely on the excellent MacTutor History of Mathematics archive (so much so that some people think I run the site, or MacTutor runs the Twitter feed).
Basically, I choose a mathematician who was born or died on each day according to a bunch of constraints. People sometimes tweet and say “why have you chosen X; what about Y?”
The basic ground rules are: one tweet per day, each mathematician once per year. This causes some conflicts that people don’t naturally understand. For example, on 23rd January I tweeted about James Lighthill, who MacTutor describes as “one of the foremost English applied mathematicians of his day”. Why, wondered Twitter user @gemmarobles, was I ignoring David Hilbert, also born that day? Well, I included Lighthill on his birthday because he died on the same day that Lexis was born, who MacTutor report as “initiating the study of time series”. And Lexis died on the day Galois was born. And although there are a few mathematicians who were born or died on 14th February, when Hilbert died, there is no clear issue with placing Hilbert on that day. So why did I choose Lighthill over Hilbert? Because Galois was born on the day Lexis died. At some point, an arbitrary decision needs to be made and this has consequences down the line.
Apart from these basic constraints, I have a bunch of extra rules. I am doing this to try to generate interest, so I try include some variety. I like to try to tweet from different eras and different mathematical areas on adjacent days if possible. I favour time periods when few dates are known or cultures without many mathematicians in the database because these have fewer opportunities to get picked. I also think it is good to highlight women in mathematics or other important issues such as race or disability, again if possible. It is also pleasing to make people aware of the mathematical contributions of mathematicians who are better known for something else, or people who were not principally mathematicians but made a contribution. Anyone who meets some of these criteria might see favour over other mathematicians associated with the same day.
Still, much as I like to include mathematicians that people won’t know and highlight time periods and issues they haven’t thought about, it is the big hitters, Euler and Gauss and other well known names, who get the large numbers of retweets and interest. So I include them because that is how followership of the account grows and links to maths history content spread. If people are only going to take an interest on a famous anniversary, at least they are taking an interest at all.
Do I think the world has gone over the top on Turing? I do think there is value to be had. Leveraging Turing’s name and the interest generated by his centenary to attempt to do some good for gay rights is a noble undertaking (although I have my doubts over the precise details). Using Turing to try to generate extra interest in the history of mathematics, cryptography and computing is worthwhile. If we aren’t going to get people’s attention at the big 100, when will we? I remember seeing a lecture by Robin Wilson where he lamented the relative lack of interest in the 300th anniversary of Euler’s birth in 2007, which could have been a great opportunity to raise the profile of mathematics in wider culture. It’s clear to see why the 305th anniversary this year just hasn’t got the same traction.
However, I worry about the others involved with the war work at Bletchley Park or the early development of computers who are getting eclipsed, and, for that matter, all the other history of maths and computing stories that are worth telling but can’t get the attention. Celebrating the big names supports the idea that advances are made in giant leaps by great men (mostly men), whereas history is constantly being made in small steps. On top of this, I worry that the attention people are giving Turing is fairly superficial. People aren’t, I think, gaining a wider understanding of the historical context into which Turing fits, or of the place of mathematics research in our culture. And I worry that this interest won’t be sustained. What happens in the cold light of Sunday morning when it’s all over? Perhaps we can sustain some interest until the end of the centenary year but will ‘Turing100’ have a lasting impact on people’s minds? Turing died in 1954. Will we ignore him again until 2054?
Anyway, must dash. I have to draft my exciting Turing centenary day post for tomorrow.
Instant MathJax preview of LaTeX typed into HTML textareas
I’ve completely rewritten my write maths, see maths library to be a little jQuery plugin that attaches itself to editable areas on pages, like contenteditable elements, textareas, and input boxes. When your cursor is inside some LaTeX, a little preview box appears just above it with the LaTeX rendered through MathJax. I’ve made a demo page on GitHub, and the code itself is available there too.
Continue reading “Instant MathJax preview of LaTeX typed into HTML textareas” on cp’s mathem-o-blog
A huggermuggering nonannouncement of an overinvolved knickknack
It’s odd, the process of waking up. Sometimes you can get out of bed and stumble around for an hour or two, maybe even get dressed and go to work, before your brain does anything to differentiate you from a patient in a highly mobile vegetative state. On other days it seems that your mental starter motor catches on the first try and before you’ve even opened your eyes all sorts of brilliantly original thoughts are competing for attention.
Today is one of those days. As I swung my big long legs out of bed the thought occurred to me that the word “cheese” has an awful lot of Es in it.
Fibonacci Grids
I uploaded this video to YouTube last week but I forgot to make a post here. It’s about a moderately interesting fact about fibonacci numbers that David Cushing told me at MathsJam. I generalised it a bit, so I’ve been meaning to write a post for The Aperiodical or do a snappy video or something like that for ages.
I finally decided last week to just sit down and record myself going through the proof, so here’s that video. I deliberately didn’t prepare beforehand, so it’s just under an hour long and contains a lot of thinking out loud.
