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.
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Ditching the fifth axiom (video)
Watch geometer/topologist Caleb Ashley explain the parallel postulate on Numberphile.
@standupmaths’ petition has had a response from the government
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
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.
A new aspect of mathematics
This is a guest post written by David Nkansah, a mathematics student at the University of Glasgow.
Around the fourth century BC, the term ‘Mathematics’ was defined by Aristotle as the “science of quantity”. It’s my own experience as a young mathematician to say this definition, although correct in its own right, poses a problem for those who do not truly know what mathematics is. It fails to highlight the true creativity of the subject.
Human inspiration and imagination are essential ingredients in mathematics. Regarding creativity, one could say, with merit, that in a sense mathematics is an art. Before proceeding to outline similarities between sketching mathematical proofs and painting on a canvas, it is important to know what fundamental premises mathematical proofs are built on.
Binary, with Anne-Marie Imafidon (video)
Watch mathematician and entrepreneur Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE explain binary numbers. Anne-Marie studied for an MSc in mathematics at Oxford University, and founded the social enterprise Stemettes to encourage more women and girls into STEM careers.
Holo-Math sounds pretty wild
Any project which manages to make Cédric Villani look even more like a time traveller gets my immediate attention. Look!
HOLO-MATH’s website is short on firm details, but it seems to be something to do with using Microsoft’s HoloLens VR goggle thingies to make interactive VR maths “experiences”. Here’s the blurb:
HOLO-MATH is an international project to produce immersive live experiences in mathematical sciences using the latest mixed reality technology.
It’s the first project to use state of the art technology for scientific knowledge transfer in a museum environment and on a large scale.
The experiences are presented in science museums/centers and at special events. They are targeted at groups of 20 participants led by human guides and virtual avatars. New forms of augmented visualization and interaction are core features. The audio-visual experience is of the highest quality.
In different HOLO-MATH experiences, participants will be able to play, discover, experiment and learn about science history and current research.
There’s more information on holo-math.org, and some pictures of be-goggled guests at the project’s launch on the hashtag #holomath.