A while ago I collected a few of the mathsy games I play on my phone to while away my commute. I’ve found a few new ones since then, so I thought I’d do a new post to tell you about them.
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Read my thesis (an offer, rather than an instruction)
I know many thousands of you have been writing in to Aperiodical HQ asking “when, oh when will we get to read Peter’s PhD thesis?” Well, the moment you’ve all been waiting for is finally here. The university have now put it online as a PDF available via the institutional repository. As a reminder, here’s the abstract:
George Green: Nottingham’s Magnificent Mathematician
We don’t regard him as a miller, I’m afraid, we regard him as a very eminent mathematician whose work today is still being used in major industries and concerns.
– George Saunders, descendant of George Green, on being asked a question about bags of flour on the Alan Clifford show on BBC Radio Nottingham of 11th September 2014 (starts approx. 1:16).
The above quote is from a short interview with George Saunders and Kathryn Summerwill on BBC local radio about George Green. Green, of whom you may have heard, was a mill-owner in Nottingham and a genius mathematical physicist. The interview marks the opening of an exhibition, curated by Kathryn, ‘George Green: Nottingham’s Magnificent Mathematician‘ in the Weston Gallery at the Lakeside Arts Centre, University of Nottingham.
Puzzlebomb – September 2014
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 33 of Puzzlebomb, for September 2014, can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 33 – September 2014
The solutions to Issue 33 can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 33 – September 2014 – Solutions
Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
Carnival of Mathematics 114
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of August, and compiled by Murray Bourne, is now online at SquareCircleZ.
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.
Interesting Esoterica Summation, volume 9
Oof! It’s been nearly a year since I last shared my findings in the field of interesting esoterica. I fear this may be quite a long post.
In case you’re new to this: every now and then I encounter a paper or a book or an article that grabs my interest but isn’t directly useful for anything. It might be about some niche sub-sub-subtopic I’ve never heard of, or it might talk about something old from a new angle, or it might just have a funny title. I put these things in my Interesting Esoterica collection on Mendeley. And then when I’ve gathered up enough, I collect them here.
In this post the titles are links to the original sources, and I try to add some interpretation or explanation of why I think each thing is interesting below the abstract.
Some things might not be freely available, or even available for a reasonable price. Sorry.
Small gaps between large gaps between primes results
The big news last year was the quest to find a lower bound for the gap between pairs of large primes, started by Yitang Zhang and carried on chiefly by Terry Tao and the fresh-faced James Maynard.
Now that progress on the twin prime conjecture has slowed down, they’ve both turned their attentions toward the opposite question: what’s the biggest gap between subsequent small primes?