For International Women’s Day, mathematician Lucy Rycroft-Smith has read a selection of maths books by women authors, and recommended some favourites.
There’s a strange irony about being a woman in mathematics. You spend a huge amount of time and energy answering questions about being a woman in mathematics instead of, you know, using that time and energy to do or write about actual maths. We women are somehow both the problem and the solution.
But behold: 2020 is here, and better and braver women than I have solved this conundrum. Here are a whole host of excellent books about maths by women that you should definitely read, collected for you by another woman in maths.
Recently someone on Twitter, and then two people on US cable news, said that Michael Bloomberg could have used the \$500 million he spent on his presidential campaign to give everyone in the USA \$1 million. This caused quite a fuss.
In short, someone divided 500 by 327, saw that the answer was bigger than 1 and the units were “millions”, and concluded that the money could instead have been distributed to give everyone \$1 million.
That’s an easy mistake to make for someone writing a tweet, but the kind of error that should have made someone think “does that make sense?” before planning a segment on TV news about it.
It’s raised a couple of interesting questions, though:
If that money was shared between every American citizen, how much would each one get?
If Michael Bloomberg wanted to give \$1 million to everyone in a smaller area, where could he choose?
I realised that all the data I need is freely available on the internet, so I made a website to do the calculations for you:
It asks you how much money you’ve got, then for every power of 10 dollars, it tells you where in the USA you could give every resident that much.
To give you an idea of how far the net worths of people like Michael Bloomberg could go, it’s got a list of shortcuts for billionaires. Appropriately, I got that data from Bloomberg’s own website. Bloomberg himself was mysteriously missing from the list, so I got his net worth from Google and added it in myself.
The most unexpected thing for me was seeing how much money these people would have left over after giving everyone in the USA \$100. They’d still be enormously, unimaginably rich!
I’ll describe a few of the fiddly details of the implementation now. At first the “how much money have you got?” input was a text field, but I realised it’d be much better to have a slider that you can swing from \$1 all the way up to \$1 trillion. It’s a logarithmic scale, so powers of 10 are equally spaced.
I got data on the populations of US cities and states from data.census.gov.
Working out which amounts and places to show you wasn’t completely straightforward. I thought it’d be easiest to fix the amounts given away to a power of 10 per person, and to find places where the population meant that the amount left over would be as small as possible. To do that, my code works through the list of places in ascending order of population, and stops at the last place whose population is big enough to give everyone at least the target amount.
I enjoyed making this tool, and I hope it helps somebody get a better feel for what these big numbers mean.
At the MathsJam annual gathering, one of the many activities attendees can participate in is a competition competition – entrants each come up with a competition and submit it into a larger competition, other attendees enter each of the competitions within the competition competition, and the organisers get the chance to make long and confusing (but strictly correct) announcements that contain the word competition a lot of times.
This year, we decided, after a spectacular last-minute MathsJam bake-off entry failure on the behalf of Katie, to enter a joint competition into the competition competition. Inspired by the ‘lowest unique answer’ style of competition, which has previously featured in various MathsJam Competition Competitions (and our recent lecture on game theory) we came up with an idea – what about a competition seeking a unique entry in a non-ordered set?
While I’m on strike, I’m catching up on stuff I’ve made but never posted about here.
At the Talking Maths in Public conference last August, I was talking with Katie Steckles and Kevin Houston about the order of operations. I think that another one of those ambiguously-written sums had gone round Twitter again. I said it would be good to have a tool where you can write an expression, then change the order of operations and see what happens.
So, on the way home, I wrote one! I’ve called it SAMDOB, which is an anagram of BODMAS.
Please have a play with it. I can imagine that this could be useful to people teaching the order of operations in real life. Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements.
Last year I wrote about a 3D-printed puzzle I’d designed, called Seven Triples.
At work we want to use this puzzle during an A-Level enrichment day, which means we need about twenty copies of it. I 3D-printed four copies over the course of a couple of weeks, in amongst other jobs, and I don’t have the patience to do any more. So, I’ve made a 2D version that we can print and cut out much more quickly.
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of January, is now online at Storm Bear World.
The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.
In the Aperiodical’s Big Internet Math-Off 2019, Becky Warren posted an entry about Geogebra’s ‘reflect object in circle’ tool (it’s the second article in the post). I enjoyed playing with the tool and, after making a few colourful designs, it occurred to me that one of them would make a great cake for the MathsJam bake-off. It would only work if the curves were accurate; sadly this would be beyond my drawing abilities, and definitely beyond my piping abilities. But with some help from 3D printing I thought I might be able to manage it.
Here are the steps I used to transfer the design to a cake.