Earlier this year, when getting the train to work was still a thing for me, I noticed this statistic:
The enormous difficulty of telling the truth about escalators with statistics
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Fi-Bee-onacci
Andrew Stacey: I have a confession to make that would probably get me thrown out of every respectable Mathematics Society – were I to belong to one.
I am not a fan of the Fibonacci sequence.
Neither am I keen on the golden ratio. It’s not even transcendental.
It’s not really their fault, it’s just that they get levered in everywhere whether they belong there or not. Particularly in discussions of nature and beauty, and this is exemplified by that ridiculous origin story. We’ve been subjected to a variety of bizarre origin stories over the years (cough radioactive spider cough) but the rabbit story is another level of bizarre.
So I was intrigued, and then delighted, when one of my students, who is a bee enthusiast, told me about a genuinely natural occurrence of the Fibonacci sequence in the ancestry of bees.
I’ll let her take up the story.
The permutation clock
I recently had an idea: map the Unix time (seconds since 1st January 1970) to shufflings of a deck of cards. Each second would correspond to a different ordering of the 52 cards.
I wanted to think about how mind-bogglingly huge $52!$ is: $52!$ seconds is more than $2 \times 10^{60}$ years. So even if you spent your entire life watching this thing, you’d leave this world having seen basically none of the possible permutations. Happily, Wikipedia reckons that the heat death of the universe will happen in about $10^{100}$ years, so there’s plenty of time for me to enact my plan.
Aperiodical Round Up 11: more than you could ever need, want or be able to know
Hello, my name’s Christian Lawson-Perfect and my main mathematical interest is “everything”.
Before The Aperiodical existed as its own thing, the only outlet I had for my mathematical eclecticism was a series of posts on the Acme Science blog called Aperiodical Round-Up. Eventually I stopped writing them, as work and family took up more of my time. This post has been sitting in The Aperiodical’s drafts folder for six years. Time to finish it!
Let’s begin with the first 10,000 digits of π dialled on a rotary phone.
Resources for learning probability and statistics
I was recently asked for some recommendations of resources for learning about probability and statistics, for someone without a strong mathematical background. I did a little digging, and have collated what I found here in case it’s useful to anyone else. Add your own suggestions in the comments!
Carnival of Maths 184
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of July, is now online at Tom Rocks Maths.
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.
nimsticks: LaTeX package for drawing Nim sticks and games
A while ago on this blog I shared a LaTeX macro I had written for drawing games of Nim. I have now taken the plunge and written this into a LaTeX package called nimsticks. (Why? What do you do to relax on a lazy Sunday morning?)
Here is the description of the nimsticks package:
This LaTeX package provides commands
\drawnimstickto draw a single nim stick and\nimgamewhich represents games of multi-pile Nim. Nim sticks are drawn with a little random wobble so they look ‘thrown together’ and not too regular.
What this does it allows commands such as \nimgame{5,3,4} which renders like this:
