Being a mathematician, I often get asked if I’m good at calculating tips. I’m not. In fact, mathematicians study lots of other things besides numbers. As most people know, if they stop to think about it, one of the other things mathematicians study is shapes. Some of us are especially interested in the symmetries of those shapes, and a few of us are interested in both numbers and symmetries.
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- Mike Bassett, England Manager
Footballs on road signs: an international overview
I’m an old fashioned manager, I write the team down on the back of a fag packet and I play a simple 4-4-2.
I’m very much like Mike Bassett: I like standing on the terraces, I like full-backs whose main skill is kicking wingers into the ad hoardings, and – most of all – I like geometrically correct footballs.
Stirling’s numbers in a nutshell
This is a guest post by researcher Audace Dossou-Olory of Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
In assignment problems, one wants to find an optimal and efficient way to assign objects of a given set to objects of another given set. An assignment can be regarded as a bijective map $\pi$ between two finite sets $E$ and $F$ of $n\geq 1$ elements. By identifying the sets $E$ and $F$ with $\{1,2,\ldots, n\}$, we can represent an assignment by a permutation.
A new aspect of mathematics
This is a guest post written by David Nkansah, a mathematics student at the University of Glasgow.
Around the fourth century BC, the term ‘Mathematics’ was defined by Aristotle as the “science of quantity”. It’s my own experience as a young mathematician to say this definition, although correct in its own right, poses a problem for those who do not truly know what mathematics is. It fails to highlight the true creativity of the subject.
Human inspiration and imagination are essential ingredients in mathematics. Regarding creativity, one could say, with merit, that in a sense mathematics is an art. Before proceeding to outline similarities between sketching mathematical proofs and painting on a canvas, it is important to know what fundamental premises mathematical proofs are built on.
Carnival of Mathematics 150
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of September, and compiled by Alexander, 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.
Circular reasoning on Catalan numbers
This is a guest post by researcher Audace Dossou-Olory of Stellenbosch University, South Africa.
Consider the following question: How many ways are there to connect $2n$ points on a circle so that each point is connected to exactly one other point?
Measuring π with a pendulum
Friends of the Aperiodical, nerd-comedy troupe Festival of the Spoken Nerd, are currently on tour around the UK. As part of their show, questionably titled You Can’t Polish a Nerd, Matt Parker attempts to calculate the value of $\pi$ using only a length of string and some meat encased in pastry. He’s previously done this on YouTube, and the idea was inspired by the Aperiodical’s 2015 Pi Approximation Challenge, and in particular my own attempt to approximate $\pi$ with a (more conventional) pendulum.