Welcome to the 131st edition of the Carnival of Mathematics, a monthly blogging carnival which scoots its way round the internet, rounding up maths-related blog posts from the month of January.
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MathsJam talks now online
The talk summaries and slides from last November’s MathsJam conference are now online!
MathsJam is a monthly maths night that takes place in over 30 pubs all over the world, and it’s also an annual weekend conference in November. The conference comprises 5-minute talks on all kinds of topics in and related to mathematics, particularly recreational maths, games and puzzles.
The talks archive has now been updated with the 2015 talks – there’s a short summary of what each talk was about, along with any slides, in PPT and PDF format, and relevant links.
Wherein CLP “improves” Chinese New Year
新年好, everyone! It was Chinese New Year on Monday, starting the year of the monkey. I didn’t really pay attention last year, so I didn’t know that it had been the year of the goat. I also wasn’t aware until just now when I looked it up that next year will be the year of the rooster.
Open Season: Pancake Flipping
In this series of articles, I’m writing about mathematical questions we don’t know the answer to – which haven’t yet been proven or disproven. This edition is a topical one, for Pancake Day (Shrove Tuesday, celebrated in the UK this year on 9th February).
Some of the best mathematical teasers are those which originate in a real-world problem – although the problem for pure mathematicians is that that happens much less often than it does for applied mathematicians, who are presented with interesting real-world problems all the time. That’s why it’s especially nice when a more pure one pops up, and that’s exactly what happened to mathematician Jacob E Goodman, back in 1975.
Puzzlebomb – February 2016
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 50 of Puzzlebomb, for February 2012, can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 50 – February 2016
The solutions to Issue 50 can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 50 – February 2016 – Solutions
Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found at Puzzlebomb.co.uk.
Learning to play Go
We bumped into Robert at the last MathsJam conference. He spoke so enthusiastically about Go, and how easy it is to get started, that we asked him if he could write a guide for someone who wants to get into the game. Here it is!
This article is designed for those who want to learn Go or read about a way of teaching it.
Go is an ancient game from Asia (being deliberately vague here). The reasons I love this game are the simplicity of the rules and the fact it has an effective handicap system. The rule system means it is great to introduce to people who may not have a background in games. The handicap allows beginners to play world champions and for both to have a challenging game.
The Aperiodical’s Actual Snowflake Competition – Results
Before Christmas, we launched a winter-themed maths competition – to design a sensible hexagonal snowflake, using a square grid, which could be used to knit a wintery jumper and not a) look terrible or b) have non-hexagonal symmetry. We had a deluge of entries, some valid and others less so – in fact, we may have had at least one entry break each of the rules we set. Below is a round-up of all the entries we received.