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“How can you do coursework for maths?” What I marked this year
A while ago I was helping out at an open day. The material presented gave some information about the range of assessment types we use. A potential applicant asked me “how can you do coursework for maths?”. She felt that (what she understood as) maths could only be assessed by examination. (This is presumably because her experience of the English school system has not exposed her to anything but exams for maths.)
I thought it might be interesting (to me, at least) to list the types of assessment I’ve been involved in marking in the 2015/16 academic year.
CLP reads “Non-sexist solution to the ménage problem”
I rediscovered this nice paper by Kenneth P. Bogart in my Interesting Esoterica collection, and decided to read through it. It turned out that, while the solution presented is very neat, there’s quite a bit of hard work to do to along the way. I’m not particularly experienced with combinatorics, so the little facts that the paper skips over took me quite a while to verify.
Once I was happy with the proof, I decided to record a video explaining how it works. Here it is:
I probably made mistakes. If you spot one, please write a polite correction in the comments.
There was a “beauty of maths” garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. Yeah, sure, why not
The Winton Beauty of Mathematics Garden was an entry in this year’s Chelsea Flower Show. It looks like this:
Photo from Winton Capital, via The RHS on Twitter.
Apparently those symbols winding their way around the garden are “plant growth algorithms”, whatever those are.
There’s also a golden-ratio-thingy water feature, of course.
You can thank Winton Capital, sponsors of all sorts of worthy maths projects, for this bit of mathsy art.
This video about the proof of the Kelmans-Seymour conjecture is adorable
Theorem: every 5-connected non-planar graph contains a subdivision of $K_5$.
The above statement, conjectured independently by Alexander Kelmans and Paul Seymour in the 70s, is very easy to say. And the video below, starring Dawei He, Yan Wang, and Xingxing Yu, makes it look very easy to prove:
It’s like they got Wes Anderson to film an academic PR video. In the normally uninspiring world of maths press releases, it’s quite refreshing. And the written press release is pretty snappy, too. Let’s not make this a thing, though.
A new home for Interesting Esoterica
Since 2010, I’ve been maintaining a list of “interesting esoterica” – papers, books, essays and poems that I find interesting entirely on their own merits. It’s mainly bits of esoteric maths – hence the name – but I’ve also included quite a few things just because they have amusing titles. The main idea is that when I’m talking to someone and want to show them a cool thing that I’ve half-remembered, I can look up the exact reference: I’ve shared the paper “Orange peels and Fresnel integrals” more times than I can count (probably the same as the number of times I’ve eaten an orange).
Solomon Golomb (1932-2016)
“I’m proud that I’ve lived to see… so many of the things that I’ve worked on being so widely adopted that no one even thinks about where they came from.” ((Solomon W. Golomb – 2016 Laureate of the Franklin Institute in Electrical Engineering)) Solomon Golomb (1932-2016)
Solomon Golomb, who died on Sunday May 1st, was a man who revelled in the key objects in a recreational mathematician’s toolbox: number sequences, shapes and words (in many languages). He also carved out a distinguished career by, broadly speaking, transferring his detailed knowledge of the mathematics behind integer sequences to engineering problems in the nascent field of digital communications, and his discoveries are very much still in use today.