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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
One day, a couple of months ago, I was walking my son to nursery and he asked what I was doing that day. I said I was going to do some teaching. What about? he asked. Well.
My son is obsessed with the Spike Milligan nonsense poem ‘On the Ning Nang Nong’. Here’s a video of Spike reciting it.
This weekend, he asked me to help him learn it. I’ve tried to memorise it before, to save having to find the book when he wants me to recite it. But somehow, it’s never quite stuck. I can remember all the bits and the basic order (Cows-Trees-Mice), and know what happens after the lines ending “Nong” (“Cows go bong”), “Ning” (“Trees go ping”) and “Nang” (“Mice go clang”). What I struggle with is remembering which order the “Ning”, “Nang” and “Nong” go before the one that rhymes with what comes next.
At the weekend, I wrote “Ning”, “Nang” and “Nong” on pieces of paper and we rearranged them as we read the poem. I realised my difficulty is a mathematician pattern-spotting one. There’s a not-quite Latin square embedded in the poem.