For a diagram for a class this week, I’ve written a LaTeX command to draw star graphs using TikZ. A star graph $K_{1,n}$ is a graph with a single central node, $n$ radial nodes, and $n$ edges connecting the central node to each radial node. I am sharing this here in case it is useful to anyone else.
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- have contributed to the field of science
- be real – so no fictional characters please
- not be alive – Her Majesty the Queen is the only exception
- have shaped thought, innovation, leadership or values in the UK
- inspire people, not divide them
Big MathsJam Highlights, 2018
The dust is settling on the ninth Big MathsJam, and before I get too sad that it’s nearly a year until the next one, I put down some thoughts about what was so good about this one.
Here are the mathematicians you nominated to go on the new £50 note
The Bank of England has released a preliminary list of names nominated by the public to appear on the new £50 note. I’ve done a bit of analysis on the list, and present here my findings.
To recap: the Bank asked for nominations satisfying the following conditions:
The released list consists of the names that were nominated in the first week, and belong to people who are real, deceased, and contributed to science ‘in any way’. They haven’t divulged the number of times each name was nominated, or the ineligible names.
Euler in maths and engineering
Inspired by Katherine Johnson’s character in the film Hidden Figures and her use of Euler’s Method, engineer Natalie-Claire Luwisha has written this guest post about Euler’s contribution to engineering.
I thoroughly enjoyed Hidden Figures because of the overall message and inspiration it generated for all women, especially women of colour. Even today in the 21st century, most of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) industries still have a very low percentage of women and even fewer women of colour. One major factor in this is the lack of visible role models for young girls and women to aspire to, so this story based on real-life events was ideal to help tackle the issue.
Carnival of Mathematics 161
Issue 161 of the Carnival of Mathematics, slightly belatedly rounding up blog posts from the month of August, and compiled by Alex, is now online at CoDiMa.
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.
Zeckendorf cup arithmetic
My 5-minute talk at the big MathsJam conference this weekend was about some stacking cups that my daughter is too young to appreciate. Here’s the really quick version, in just over a minute:
I gave the answer at MathsJam, but the title of this post contains a big hint that should get you there with a bit of googling.
Baking Babylonian cuneiform tablets in gingerbread
The MathsJam conference has a baking competition. My friend the archaeologist Stephen O’Brien tweeted a while ago a link to a fun blog post ‘Edible Archaeology: Gingerbread Cuneiform Tablets‘. Babylonian tablets are among the earliest written evidence of mathematics that we have, and were produced by pressing a stylus into wet clay.
So it was that I realised I could enter some Babylonian-style tablets made from gingerbread.
I made a gingerbread reconstruction of a particular tablet, YBC 7289, which Bill Casselman calls “one of the very oldest mathematical diagrams extant“. Bill writes about the notation on the tablet and explains how it shows an approximation for the square root of two. I’m sure I didn’t copy the notation well, because I am just copying marks rather than understanding what I’m writing. I also tried to copy the lines and damage to the tablet. Anyway, here is my effort:
In addition, I used the rest of the dough to make some cuneiform biscuits. I tried to copy characters from Plimpton 322, a Babylonian tablet thought to contain a list of Pythagorean triples. Again, Bill Casselman has some interesting information on Plimpton 322.
Below, I try to give a description of my method.