The Aperiodical 

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Infographic – Women in STEM

By Katie Steckles. Posted April 3, 2012

Feminist website Hello Ladies has posted an infographic, from EngineeringDegree.net, discussing the discrepancy in achievement between men and women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects. It’s beautifully presented, and compares the early attainment of boys and girls (higher for girls) and then the subsequent decline in both confidence and choosing STEM subjects. Draw your own conclusions about causality. The list of percentages of people of each gender in various STEM subjects doesn’t include maths, but does show which subjects feel the lack of women more extremely (in particular, engineering subjects fare worse than sciences).



What sank the Titanic?

By Peter Rowlett. Posted April 3, 2012



RMS Titanic, which sank on 15 April 1912 after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City, is the subject of seemingly a million TV programmes this month and a new article in Physics World. The article attempts to answer the obvious question:

When people ask the question “What sank the Titanic?”, at first glance the answer is obvious: she hit an iceberg. But that simplistic answer masks deeper and more substantive questions: why did the Titanic hit the berg in the first place and why did she sink so quickly?

IMA W. Mids 17 April: ‘Routing Military Convoys’ by Andy Verity-Harrison

By Peter Rowlett. Posted April 3, 2012

On 17th April 2012 the West Midlands Branch of the IMA will hear ‘Routing Military Convoys’ by Andy Verity-Harrison. in Birmingham near New Street railway station. Non-members welcome, no charge is made. Abstract:

Current military operations emphasise the need for mobility more than ever. Thus, routing convoys so that they reach their correct destinations in the shortest time is important. However, the planning itself can be considerable and must be carried out quickly if operational tempo is to be maintained. With this in mind the military planning problem of simultaneously routing multiple convoys between multiple origin and destination locations was formulated as a combinatorial optimisation problem and used as a benchmark problem for investigating the applicability of a variety of optimisation methods to military decision making.

Intersections: Art inspired by maths at the Science Museum

By Peter Rowlett. Posted April 3, 2012

The Telegraph numeracy campaign has a review of Intersections, an exhibition available at The Mathematics Gallery at the Science Museum and at the Royal Society from 5 April to 20 June 2012, which “throws new light on the often overlooked common ground of art and maths”.

The article writes about Henry Moore, who drew inspiration from the Mathematics Gallery at the Science Museum while a student at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s.

What particularly fired Moore’s artistic imagination in this gallery was the collection of 19th-century “ruled surface models” – a rather opaque name for what are arrangements of strings, pulled taut between either wood or metal plates, which can then be adjusted to create complex three-dimensional shapes with exotic names like conoid, ellipsoid and cylindroid. They were built – primarily in a workshop in Munich – in an effort to make real for students of pure mathematics, as well as trainee engineers and architects, geometric forms that could otherwise only be expressed in abstract equations.

Gathering for Gardner 10 #g4g10

By Peter Rowlett. Posted April 3, 2012

You may be aware that Gathering for Gardner 10 took place last week.

All mathematical blogging to cease

By Peter Rowlett. Posted April 1, 2012

The feeds at Mathblogging.org ran dry this morning following a realisation that every topic has now been covered.

The news prompted a major fall in the Mathblogging.org share price, sparking concerns about the aggregator’s future.

The news is particularly unwelcome for The Aperiodical, a blogging collaboration which is still yet to formally launch. The realisation came to light when the team behind The Aperiodical concluded that there was nothing new to blog about.

“We thought we could write a post about representing Sicherman dice as a different dissections of a diagram,” said Katie Steckles on behalf of the group, “but it’s been done”.

The team then thought they might write about the asymptotic distribution of a single eigenvalue gap of a Wigner matrix, a description of Nicolas Bourbaki’s wedding invitation or a story about a US President finding an original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, but all have been written.

“We worked all through the night trying to think of ideas,” Steckles explained, “but came up blank. Every possible topic has been blogged somewhere, and there’s certainly no point in mathematics blogs repeating each other.”

So what now for the group? “We’ll just have to wait until someone invents some new mathematics.”

Until then, all mathematical blogging worldwide will cease and mathematical bloggers will have to find some other contribution to make. Some have announced plans to move down the xkcd purity scale until they find a subject that can be infinitely re-interpreted.

Carnival of Mathematics page launched

By Peter Rowlett. Posted March 29, 2012

There is a new page collating all previous Carnival of Mathematics posts and listing future hosts, and through which you can volunteer to host future Carnivals: “Carnival of Mathematics“.