Here’s a fun thing I found: the Journal of Number Theory has a YouTube channel on which it publishes video abstracts of its papers. To my surprise, they’ve been doing it since 2008!
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Poetry in Motion
Phil Ramsden gave an excellent talk at the 2013 MathsJam conference, about a particularly mathematical form of poetry. We asked him to write an article explaining it in more detail.
Generals gathered in their masses,
Just like witches at black masses.(Butler et al., “War Pigs”, Paranoid, 1970)
Brummie hard-rockers Black Sabbath have sometimes been derided for the way writer Geezer Butler rhymes “masses” with “masses”. But this is a little unfair. After all, Edward Lear used to do the same thing in his original limericks. For example:
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, “It is just as I feared!-
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!”(“There was an Old Man with a beard”, from Lear, E., A Book Of Nonsense, 1846.)
And actually, the practice goes back a lot longer than that. The sestina is a poetic form that dates from the 12th century, and was later perfected by Dante. It works entirely on “whole-word” rhymes.
My week at BCME8
This week I’m contributing to the 8th British Congress of Mathematics Education (BCME). If you’re going, I hope to see you there! (I’ll be there Monday after dinner and Wednesday all day; otherwise it’s a normal teaching week for us.)
I’m involved with three sessions – a fun Maths Jam, a ‘how I used history in my teaching’ workshop and a research talk based on half my PhD. Here are the details:
Peter Rowlett: Viva Survivor
I am interviewed about my PhD research and my experience of the viva in the new episode of the Viva Survivors podcast. This podcast, by Nathan Ryder (@DrRyder), interviews PhD graduates about their research, the viva and life afterwards.
Carnival of Mathematics 109
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of March, and compiled by Tony Mann, is now online at Tony’s Maths Blog.
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 – April 2014
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 28 of Puzzlebomb, for April 2014, can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 28 – April 2014
The solutions to Issue 28 can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 28 – April 2014 – Solutions
Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
Guesting on the ‘Wrong, But Useful’ first anniversary episode
You may recall that Samuel Hansen and I used to have a weekly conversation about mathematics in the news and news in mathematics, which we called the Math/Maths Podcast and released through the (still going!) science communication project Pulse-Project. When we put Math/Maths on hiatus (the length of which is still an open question), this left a gap in the lucrative ‘two blokes talking about maths-y stuff’ market. Leaping on the opportunity, plucky young podcasters Colin Beveridge and Dave Gale started Wrong, But Useful (as you may recall from a previous post here). Well, that was a year ago now and, as creatures whose outlook is tied to this planet, that is apparently worth celebrating. Through a careful constructed mock-feud, Colin and Dave reeled in first Samuel and then me to join them in an anniversary recording.