Mega-late to the party, I’ve now arrived back from a week lecturing in Indonesia and have found time to go and see the incredibly well-received and widely talked-about NASA women maths film, Hidden Figures. I’ve heard an incredible number of wildly positive responses to the film, from as long ago as January, and have been looking forward to it greatly.
The film is a painstaking and at times brutally realistic depiction of the struggles faced by African-Americans, and by women, during the era of the early space missions.
“Life moves very fast. It rushes from Heaven to Hell in a matter of seconds.”
― Paulo Coelho
This week, I was suddenly reminded of a fact I’d been meaning to keep track of, and I was disappointed to discover that even though I always endeavour to remember birthdays and holidays (mainly due to a system of elaborate reminders, notes and excessive list-making), I’d missed a hugely significant anniversary. Shortly after the clock struck midnight on New Year’s eve, I had passed one billion seconds old.
Fan of the site Ravi Fernando has written in to tell us about his high score at the “is this prime?” game: a cool century!
I’ve been a fan of your “Is this prime?” game for a while, and after seeing your blog post from last May, I thought I’d say hi and send you some high scores. Until recently, my record was 89 numbers (last March 12), which I think may be the dot in the top right of your “human scores” graph. But I tried playing some more a couple weeks ago, and I found I can go a little faster using my computer’s y/n buttons instead of my phone’s touch screen. It turns out 100 numbers is possible!
Watch in amazement:
But, to the delight of prime fans everywhere, he didn’t stop there:
Today I even got 107 – good to have a prime record again.
Well done, Ravi!
Now is a good time to point out that the data on every attempt ever made at the game is available to download, in case you want to do your own analysis: at time of writing, there have been over 625,000 attempts, and 51 is still the number that catches people out the most.
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of January, and compiled by Manan, is now online at Math Misery.
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.
Welcome to #104 of the Math Teachers At Play (MTaP) blog carnival. A blog carnival is a regular blogging round up coordinated by someone (in this case Denise Gaskins) that moves around different blogs each edition. This time, I’m taking a turn.
Hi! I’m Dani Poveda. This is my first post here on The Aperiodical. I’m from Spain, and I’m not a mathematician (I’d love to be one, though). I’m currently studying a Spanish equivalent to HNC in Computer Networking. I’d like to share with you some of my inquiries about some numbers. In this case, about triangular square numbers.
I’ll start at the beginning.
I’ve always loved maths, but I wasn’t aware of the number of YouTube maths channels there were. During the months of February and March 2016, I started following some of them (Brady Haran’s Numberphile, James Grime and Matt Parker among others). On July 13th, Matt published the shortest maths video he has ever made:
Maybe it’s a short video, but it got me truly mired in those numbers, as I’ve loved them since I read The Number Devil when I was 8. I only needed some pens, some paper, my calculator (Casio fx-570ES) and if I needed extra help, my laptop to write some code. And I had that quite near me, as I had just got home from tutoring high school students in maths.
I’ll start explaining now how I focused on this puzzle trying to figure out a solution.