We’ve often mentioned category theorist and occasional media-equation-provider Eugenia Cheng on the site, and she’s now produced a book, Cakes, Custard and Category Theory, which we thought we’d review. In a stupid way.
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UK National Lottery: now 21% more balls (rounded up)
This week, it was announced that from October the UK’s National Lottery, currently operated by Camelot and already providing a veritable Merlin’s cave of probability lessons for maths teachers, will be changing the rules for its main ‘Lotto’ draw. The main changes are that a new £1m prize will be added to the raffle element you didn’t know already happens, and that matching two balls will win a free ‘lucky dip’ ticket in the subsequent draw. The fixed £25 prize for matching three balls remains on the round table (even though it sometimes causes hilarious number gaffes).
But the Sword of Damocles hanging over Camelot’s changes is that there will be an extra ten balls to choose six from (59 instead of 49), dramatically lengthening the odds of winning all of the pre-existing prizes. This is our round-up of the media’s coverage of this mathematical “news”.
Carnival of Mathematics 123
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of May, and compiled by David at Mathematical Mystery Tour, is now online: Carnival 123 Part 1 and Carnival 123 Part 2.
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.
Puzzlebomb – June 2015
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 42 of Puzzlebomb, for June 2015, can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 42 – June 2015
The solutions to Issue 42 can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 42 – June 2015 – Solutions
Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
London MathsJam Recap, May 2015
I know I usually write up the goings-on at Manchester MathsJam, but since I spent much of the last month ‘In Residence’ at the University of Greenwich, I spent the second-to-last Tuesday evening of May at the London MathsJam. Here’s a summary of what transpired.
I’ve made my own numbers-in-a-grid game
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been obsessively playing the game Twenty on my phone. The fact that my wife has consistently been ahead of my high scores has nothing to do with it.
The main source of strife in my marriage.
Twenty is another in the current spate of “numbers-in-a-grid” games that also includes Threes, 1024, 2048 (and its $2^{48}$ clones), Just Get 10, and Quento.
The basic idea is that you have a grid of numbered tiles, and you combine them to build up your score. While there are lots of unimaginative derivatives of the bigger games, there’s a surprisingly large range of different games following this template.
With so many different games being created, I thought that a chap like me should be able to come up with a numbers-in-a-grid game of my own. Yet, for a long time, I just couldn’t come up with anything that was any good.
Yesterday I had a really nice shower, and the accompanying feeling that I’d come up with a really good idea – make a game to do with arithmetic progressions.
Programming to investigate Quarto
I was invited to contribute to a special issue of The Mathematics Enthusiast on ‘Risk – Mathematical or Otherwise‘, guest edited by Egan J Chernoff. I wrote about the Maths Arcade and programming strategies for a game we play there called Quarto. Really, I was sketching an outline of an idea to encourage student project work.
My title is ‘Developing Strategic and Mathematical Thinking via Game Play: Programming to Investigate a Risky Strategy for Quarto‘ and the abstract is below.