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Carnival of Mathematics in a Mathblogging.org world
For a while now (what, over a year?) the folks at Mathblogging.org have been choosing their weekly ‘picks’ of the blogs coming through their aggregator. The promise at the start of each post has amazed me:
We try to read every blog post that goes through Mathblogging.org. For the Weekly Picks, we collect posts from last week that give you an impression of what the mathematical blogosphere has to offer.
This, to me, seems an incomprehensibly difficult task. There’s so much out there and a massive selection of blogs are now indexed at the site. In light of this resource, our current attempt to revive the Carnival of Mathematics did leave me wondering whether we were barking up the wrong tree in ‘a Mathblogging.org world’.
Now the incredible level of effort that must be needed for this ever-increasing task has proven unsustainable. In a post entitled “The Weekly Picks are dead, long live the Weekly Picks“, Peter Krautzberger outlines a plan to cope with this:
The goal of the Weekly Picks has always been to show off the wealth of the mathematical blogosphere and to offer an accessible introduction to the various types of mathematical blogs out there…
For the next few weeks, we will focus the Weekly Picks on a different category each week. This will give us the room to present the full spectrum of the community.
This seems to be a reasonable plan to deal with this ever-growing task, and I’m delighted to hear the Mathblogging.org folks are human after all! However, there is a problem:
We realize this means we might be missing some great posts that just happen to appear on a week where we do not cover that category.
Aha, here is somewhere the Carnival can step in. If you feel a post you’ve written has been overlooked because Mathblogging.org wasn’t looking at your type of blog this week, you can submit it to the Carnival of Mathematics. (Of course, it’s then up to the current host to decide whether to include it.)
This approach has its problems too – much is missed, or determined by various biases or whether bloggers have heard of it or remember to submit. But while the Mathblogging.org ‘weekly picks’ represents a completist approach now focused on each category in turn, the Carnival attempts to catch the best posts across all with its anarchic, community-led method. Perhaps there is room in the world for both approaches, after all.
Carnival of Mathematics page launched
There is a new page collating all previous Carnival of Mathematics posts and listing future hosts, and through which you can volunteer to host future Carnivals: “Carnival of Mathematics“.
MacMahon Squares
In my capacity as someone who occasionally turns up and does maths at people, I often find myself exposed to ‘starter puzzles’ – things the organisers provide to whichever group of humans have come to see me do maths, to give them something to do in any waiting time before the event starts. This is, of course, a fantastic source of ideas for the MathsJam I run in Manchester, as well as just being great for me as I get to have a go at them all.
Advance in snowflake growth simulation
Scientific American are reporting that “a team of mathematicians has for the first time succeeded in simulating a panoply of snowflake shapes using basic conservation laws, such as preserving the number of water molecules in the air”.
This explains that previous simulations often simulate the crystal surface using interlocking triangles, but that:
the triangles often deform and collapse in simulations, leading to singularities that bring the simulation to an abrupt halt… Garcke’s team got around this difficulty by devising a method to describe the curvature and other geometric information about the snowflake surface so that it could be appropriately encoded into a computer.
On Disreputable Numbers
One would be hard put to find a set of whole numbers with a more fascinating history and more elegant properties surrounded by greater depths of mystery — and more totally useless — than the perfect numbers.
— Martin Gardner
There are countless ways to classify integers. Happy, perfect, friendly, sociable, abundant, extravagant, cute, interesting, frugal, deficient, hungry, undulating, weird, vampire… the list goes on. But how useful are such classifications, beyond their inherent interestingness, and as a hook to get people into number theory?
Manchester MathsJam March 2012 Recap
This month’s MathsJam was well attended – we matched last month’s turnout of 11, albeit one of that number was in the form of Ed Bradshaw, the organiser of the Washington DC MathsJam. For Ed, it was 4pm and he was in his office, using Google Plus for a live video connection to a MathsJam halfway around the world. The video connection worked fine, although in a noisy pub we struggled to hear what Ed was saying on my laptop’s tiny speakers, so for some of the evening we used headphones and took it in turns to be in conversation with Ed.