This is a follow-up to James’s FAQ for the 2014 film The Imitation Game.
Shakuntala Devi is a 2020 Indian Hindi-language film about Shakuntala Devi, a performer of impressive mental calculations, available now on Amazon Prime.
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Mobile Numbers: Hitomezashi Stitching
In this series of posts, Katie investigates simple mathematical concepts using the Google Sheets spreadsheet app on her phone. If you have a simple maths trick, pattern or concept you’d like to see illustrated in this series, please get in touch.
It’s been a while since we’ve had an entry in this column, but the other day I was sent a link to a very interesting spreadsheet (which I, of course, opened using the Google Sheets app on my phone). The initial view was a pleasing pattern of squares, in two colours:
The extraordinary Cardano family
In this guest post by David Benjamin, we explore a little of the life and times of Girolamo Cardano and his interesting family.
Girolamo Cardano (1501- 1576) was at various times in his life a physician, mathematician, inventor, addictive gambler and prisoner. He was the illegitimate son of Fazio Cardano and Chiara Micheria, and the Cardano family was a dysfunctional 16th Century version of the Simpsons.
Maths books for children
We’ve noticed a lot of great books that have been released recently aimed at primary age children (under about 11). We thought it might be useful, for those who know children of those ages, to put together a list of these titles, and some classics, in case you might be looking for some gift ideas around now.
Aperiodical’s Mathematical Seasonal Gift Guide, 2020
Given that it’s conventional to give objects to other people around this time of year, we thought we’d collect together some suggestions for things we think you, a mathematically interested person, might like to buy for your mathematical friends (or add to your list before you send it off to Santa).
Carnival of Maths 188
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of November, is now online at Sam Hartburn’s blog.
The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, occasionally including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.
Doughnuts in the Sand
This is a guest post by semi-regular guest author, mathematician-turned-maths-teacher Andrew Stacey.
I like having something mathematical to think about for times when I’m, for example, waiting in a queue to get into the supermarket. Annie Perkin’s Math Art Challenge has been a good source of such of late. These are a series of mathematically-inspired artistic activities, ranging from designing celtic knots to constructing origami polyhedra and everything in between.
My eye was caught by one on sandpiles – I’ll explain exactly what they are in a moment. One feature that made it attractive was that it was quite simple to write a program to generate diagrams. I find that the maths that interests me usually comes from looking at variations, and for that I need to generate a lot of examples. Doing them by hand quickly becomes laborious. So I whipped up a program (which I later converted to an online version) and ran it a few times to see what happened.