I recently gave a public talk about George Green’s mathematical education and influences, the audio for which is now available online.
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Watch out! I’m a blue whale and I’m about to land on you!
I don’t know why this question popped into my head, but it’s been sitting there for the past week and showing no signs of moving on.
Suppose an enemy of mine threw a friendly blue whale at me. Being a friendly whale, it makes the blue-whale-noise equivalent of “DUCK!” to warn me it’s coming.
How quickly does the whale need to be travelling for its warning to be useful?
Puzzlebomb – November 2014
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 35 of Puzzlebomb, for Novmber 2014, can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 35 – November 2014
The solutions to Issue 35 can be found here:
Puzzlebomb – Issue 35 – November 2014 – Solutions
Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
Apparently I’m not a maths genius (or, On the Subject of Parcel Sizes)
This article on BBC News caught my eye because it has “maths” in the headline. Yes, I’m that easily pleased.
Somewhere in the middle, it says that myHermes requires the “volumetric area” of a parcel to be less than 225cm. That’s right: the “volumetric area” is neither a volume nor an area but a length. Anyway, the formula for volumetric area of a package with sides $a,b,c$, where $a \leq b \leq c$, is
\[ 2(a+b) + c \]
(Importantly, $a$ and $b$ are always the two shortest sides of the package)
So the constraint is
\[ 2(a+b) + c \leq 225 \]
In the next paragraph is the puzzling statement that the maximum allowable volume for a package is $82.68$ litres, or $82680$ cm3. How did they get that?
I decided to do some calculus of variations, or whatever it’s called.
More to be done between universities and industry
I saw the video below, which is Rachel Riley being asked questions about her maths education at a Your Life event, in a tweet by Rob Loe, who quoted a section of one answer around 4:50 where Rachel says: “stop saying proudly that ‘I’m really bad at maths’ because you wouldn’t say ‘I can’t read’, you wouldn’t say ‘I can’t write’ as a proud thing.”
What particularly caught my ear was this section (around 5:30):
Early Memories
One of my earliest memories is being woken up very early and sitting on the sofa under a blanket to watch telly. This was a treat. We were never allowed to watch telly in the morning and it was almost as if we were watching telly in bed. Fantastic. On the telly were some people with bad shirts standing in front of some weird symbols and talking a lot to the camera.
Yep, my dad had got us up before dawn so that we could watch an OU maths lecture as a family. When I later asked him what it was all about over my cornflakes, he got out our child’s sized blackboard and drew some triangles all over it to demonstrate Pythagoras’s theorem.
30 something years later and I still remember this as a great experience, and not just because I got to sit under a blanket watching telly.
This early memory explains a lot about why I find Maths Jam so relaxing. We’re forced to get up too early on a Sunday morning by Colin, because he’s so blown away by the maths and he wants everyone to have a go. There’s a board with a load of symbols on that I don’t always fully understand, but always someone close to hand who will explain them to you if you just ask. It doesn’t matter if you still haven’t understood all of it. I know more now than when I started and made some friends in the process.
All we need is Maths Jam issue blankets.
Thinking Mathematically
After this year’s Maths Jam weekend, Liz Hind said she wished she had a blog. Now she does! We welcome Liz to The Aperiodical and her new column, Thoughts of a Maths Enthusiast.
At Maths Jam I surprised several people when I told them I didn’t have a maths degree. Why was this surprising? They expected everyone at Maths Jam to have one? I’m not alone in not having a maths degree at Maths Jam and I don’t think that was the reason.
A good maths education is important because it teaches you how to approach a problem, think about it objectively and break it down. It turns out I’m good at thinking about Zombie Dice and with a glass of wine (and maybe a hint or two) I can solve difficult cube puzzles. It certainly demonstrates my mathematical thinking skills.
I’m also remembered for my talks on ancient Egyptian mathematics. While the mathematical content of these talks never goes much beyond GCSE level stuff, it does rely on a real understanding of what maths is and how it relates to being human.
Does that make me a mathematician? I’m not sure. I’m certainly a maths enthusiast with a lot of thoughts. I look forward to sharing some of them with you.