A group of over 800 scientists have signed their names to an article published in Nature, explaining why statistical significance shouldn’t be relied on so heavily as a measure of the success of an experiment. We asked statistics buff Andrew Steele to explain.
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realhats: Writing a $\LaTeX$ Package
A few months ago, Adam Townsend went to lunch and had a conversation. I wasn’t there, but I imagine the conversation went something like this:
Adam: Hello.
Smitha: Hello.
Adam: How are you?
Smitha: Not bad. I’ve had a funny idea, actually.
Adam: Yes?
Smitha: You know how the\hat command in LaTeΧ puts a caret above a letter?… Well I was thinking it would be funny if someone made a package that made the \hat command put a picture of an actual hat on the symbol instead?
Adam: (After a few hours of laughter.) I’ll see what my flatmate is up to this weekend…
Jeff: What on Earth are you two talking about?!
As anyone who has been anywhere near maths at a university in the last ∞ years will be able to tell you, LaTeΧ (or $\LaTeX$) is a piece of maths typesetting software. It’s a bit like a version of Word that runs in terminal and makes PDFs with really pretty equations.
By default, LaTeΧ can’t do very much, but features can easily added by importing packages: importing the
Buzz in when you think you know the answer
Aperiodical guest author Andrew Taylor writes about an intriguing piece of number theory which turns out to also be something else.
How many ways are there of writing some natural number $n$ as the sum of two squares?
$$ n = p^2 + q^2 $$
I don’t want an answer for some particular $n$. I don’t even want a general formula. I just want to know… on average.
I’m streaming digits of π for π day
It’s π eve, and I’ve had a silly idea: I’m going to take the ridiculous website I made to show all the digits of π, and stream it scrolling indefinitely through them over the internet.
Starting at midnight GMT on 2019-03-14, the stream below will start scrolling down through the digits of π:
I had this idea this morning, and it’s running on my desktop PC which I’ll be away from until 8am tomorrow, so I won’t be surprised if something goes wrong.
But if it doesn’t: hooray!
I’ve made some maths t-shirts, and you can buy them
Because of my statistically improbable stature, it’s really hard to find clothes that fit me. So, most days I wear the lowest common denominator of all clothing styles, a t-shirt. And if I’m wearing a t-shirt, it might as well be Extremely On Brand CP and have some obscure mathematical motif on it.
Good maths t-shirts are hard to come by, so I’ve made four of my own.
I haven’t let lack of illustrating ability get in my way, and I’m quite pleased with how they’ve turned out.
Many-to-many Shape Sorter
Did you like playing with shape sorters as a toddler, but find them too simple as an adult? Well, I’ve got good news for you.
Carnival of Mathematics 167
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of February, 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.