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New maths board game Mind Your Numbers

By Katie Steckles. Posted November 4, 2017

You may recall a few years ago we posted about a crowdfunded mathematical board game called Three Sticks. Well, the team behind it are at it again and have a new concept for a game, called Mind Your Numbers.

The game involves using the numbers 1 to 9, and twelve symbols (three each of +,×,-,÷). The challenge is to combine the symbols and numbers in the right way to get a higher score than your opponent. It requires fast calculation, strategic thinking and a bit of luck.

Their IndieGoGo campaign hopes to raise enough money to go into production, and they have 7 days left to take pre-orders and donations in return for goodies. It’s also possible to make a donation which results in not you, but a worthy school in rural India, getting a copy of the game.

Watch the video below for an idea of how it works!

Braid groups win 2017 Dance Your PhD contest

By Katie Steckles. Posted November 3, 2017

If you hadn’t heard of Dance Your PhD, it’s one of many competitions open to researchers who want to communicate their work in interesting ways – although it’s unique in that it challenges people to interpret their research topic in the form of a dance.

Black Mathematician Month: Closing Ceremony

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 31, 2017

Below is an article marking the end of Black Mathematician Month, written by the team at UCL. We’ve been participating in the project too, and we’ve found it a great opportunity to invite new authors to write for our site and to showcase black mathematicians from the UK and elsewhere. We’ve posted several articles during the month, and hope to continue to feature more diverse authors on the site going forward, with a few more posts anticipated soon.

To mark the end of the month, Dr Nira Chamberlain gave a lecture yesterday at UCL, and if you missed it, the event live-stream will be posted on the Chalkdust social media:  Facebook / Twitter

Vi Hart is crowdfunding

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 30, 2017

If you appreciate the work of internet mathematician and hyperbolic virtual reality pioneer Vi Hart, or even if you’ve never heard of her before, you can now help support her work by subscribing to her Patreon. Vi Hart has never put any adverts on her videos or charged for her work until now, but since she’s stopped being employed by people who support that, she’s in need of your help. Check out the video below for details, or click the link below that to add your support.

Vi Hart’s Patreon page

Ditching the fifth axiom (video)

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 28, 2017

Watch geometer/topologist Caleb Ashley explain the parallel postulate on Numberphile.

@standupmaths’ petition has had a response from the government

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 25, 2017



Friend of the site Matt Parker recently made headlines because of his UK Government Petition to correct the heinous geometrical oddity that is the UK Tourist sign for a football ground. In the standard sign, somehow a sheet of tessellating hexagons is depicted as wrapping around a sphere in a highly improbable (and provably impossible) way.

The petition has achieved a modicum of success, in that it’s passed the 10,000 signatures required to elicit a response from the government. Sadly, the response isn’t quite what you’d like to hear.

Stirling’s numbers in a nutshell

By Audace Amen Vioutou Dossou-Olory. Posted October 25, 2017

This is a guest post by researcher Audace Dossou-Olory of Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

In assignment problems, one wants to find an optimal and efficient way to assign objects of a given set to objects of another given set. An assignment can be regarded as a bijective map $\pi$ between two finite sets $E$ and $F$ of $n\geq 1$ elements. By identifying the sets $E$ and $F$ with $\{1,2,\ldots, n\}$, we can represent an assignment by a permutation.