The CNN reports on research which uses a Markov Chain model to avoid buses bunching, a phenomenon that’s a cliché of observational comedy and “happens when buses are thrown off schedule because of traffic, weather or too many passengers at one stop”.
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EPSRC very quietly relents on maths funding
The EPSRC has silently updated its table of “areas in which fellowships are available” to include “intradisciplinary research” in mathematical sciences at all career stages. According to a post by Timothy Gowers on Google+, this “means in practice pretty much all of maths.”
Some Turing-related articles free to read for a short period of time, thanks to T&F
Taylor & Francis have generously made some articles related to Alan Turing from their archives freely available until the end of the year. They’re calling it the Alan Turing Centenary Collection, and it includes two reports written by Turing during the war, a few articles which they claim are “about Alan Turing”, and a 1978 article by 2011 Alan Turing Prize winner Judea Pearl. Grab them now, while you can.
They’re also offering 20% discounts on the books The Computer Science Handbook, The Universal Computer: The Road From Leibniz to Turing, and Bright Boys: The Making of Information Technology if you enter the code 193CM at the checkout.
T&F have made a PDF leaflet with descriptions and links to all the material in the collection. Rather cheekily, the second page of the leaflet contains a list of related articles which you might assume to be part of the collection. In fact, they’re still ambitiously priced at £27 each.
Humans v Nature – Engineering comedy show
Fresh from success with their maths/comedy tour Your Days Are Numbered: The Mathematics of Death, stand-up mathematician Matt Parker and comic/writer Timandra Harkness have put together a new maths-based comedy show, and this time instead of statistics getting the comedy treatment, it’s engineering. The show, titled ‘Humans v Nature: Engineering FTW’ looks at all the challenges Mother Nature has thrown in our way, like darkness, cold weather, gravity and hay fever, and all the things engineers have come up with to combat them. Also: there will be robots.
Supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering, the show will preview under various titles at Cheltenham Science Festival, Winchester Science Festival and Cardiff Science Festival before a 10-day run at the Edinburgh Fringe comedy festival. Tickets are now on sale, here:
http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/comedy/humans-v-nature-engineering-ftw
The Dramatic Life of Numbers: Marcus du Sautoy at Hay Festival
Marcus du Sautoy will be involved in three events at Hay Festival the weekend after next, including a talk titled Maths on Stage: The Dramatic Life of Numbers, about “his experiences working with theatre company Complicité on A Disappearing Number and his explorations of bringing maths to the stage in a recent collaboration with actress Victoria Gould.”
Marcus is also chairing a discussion of Islamic art and appearing on a panel discussing “the way we live now”.
Alex Bellos wants to know the world’s most random number
Alex Bellos, author of Alex’s Adventures in Numberland / Here’s Looking at Euclid, has started another survey about numbers, following his survey to find the world’s favourite number.
This time round, he wants “random” numbers. Answering the survey is very easy: just go to randomnumberservey.net and type a number in the box.
Alex says he hopes to have the results ready by 2013.
Link: the random number survey
Source: Alex Bellos’s blog
Has schoolboy genius solved problems that baffled mathematicians for centuries?
The Daily Mail reports that a “schoolboy ‘genius'” has solved “puzzles” “posed by” Issac Newton that have “baffled mathematicians for 350 years”. There are many nonsense warning signs but also hints that something interesting is going on.