Sir Timothy Gowers has announced on his blog a new journal, Discrete Analysis, of which he will be the managing editor. Rather than a traditional journal, this will be an open-access ‘arXiv overlay’.
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- Nick Higham’s blog post about the book
- Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics at Princeton University Press
- For some reason, there’s a Twitter feed
Vote for MathML support in Microsoft Edge
MathJax manager Peter Krautzberger continues his quest to get web browsers to support MathML, by tweeting a link to this page on the Windows UserVoice forum where you can vote to get the Microsoft Edge team to implement the maths markup standard.
Vote for MathML support: MathML at Windows Dev Feedback.
Previously in MathML’s struggle for anyone to care:
LMS Local Heroes
The London Mathematical Society, as part of its 150th anniversary celebrations, is running a project entitled Local Heroes, in which they have encouraged and funded local museums to put on exhibits about mathematicians from their area. The funding was allocated in 2014, and during 2015 various exhibits have been taking place in different parts of the UK, each celebrating a local number hero.
EDIT: the Lincoln exhibit has been extended until 3rd November – details below.
Analytical Engine, Lovelace & Babbage LEGO Ideas proposal needs support
LEGO have a system where people can propose new LEGO sets. If they get 10,000 supporters, they will be reviewed by LEGO. If LEGO like the idea, it may become an actual set they sell (and the person who proposed the idea benefits with 1% of net sales and other rewards).
Anyway, Stewart Lamb Cromar (an e-learning chap at University of Edinburgh) has proposed a set based on the Analytical Engine and featuring Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage minifigures (including, apparently, spanners). An idea has to get 1,000 supporters in its first year or it will expire; this one has passed that bar in less than two months and has over 2,600 supporters at time of writing.
Anyway, I think it looks quite cool. To support it is free, though you have to sign up for a LEGO ID and answer a short survey: ‘What would you expect this product to cost (USD)?’, ‘How many do you think most people would buy?’, ‘Who do you think this project would be good for?’ and ‘How difficult would you say this project would be to build?’. It only took a couple of minutes (I was supporter no. 2604).
Expect more Ada Lovelace this year as it’s the 200th anniversary of her birth on 10th December. For example, on 17th September at 9pm BBC Four is showing a documentary by Hannah Fry: Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing.
More information
New pentagonal tiling discovered
If you’re into tilings, or just looking to redo your bathroom in the most modern way possible, there’s big news. A team of researchers at the University of Washington-Bothell have discovered a previously unknown way to tile a plane using irregular pentagons.
Not mentioned on the Aperiodical, July 2015
Here’s a round-up of some of this month’s maths news.
The Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics
A group of applied mathematicians, including the University of Manchester’s Nick Higham, have been compiling a book on applied mathematics over the last few years, and they’ve announced it’s finally ready for publication. The book, which includes an introduction to applied mathematics, key concepts, and various examples of modelling problems, is aimed at undergraduate mathematicians and above (although some of the articles may be accessible to younger/lay readers) and comprises 186 articles by 165 authors from 23 countries. It’ll make a good companion (excuse the pun) to the Princeton Companion to Mathematics, edited by Tim Gowers and covering the pure end of the field. It will be published by Princeton University Press in September 2015.
English law hasn’t redefined the number one, but a journalist has discovered rounding
A recent court judgement ruled that the range “1 to 25” can include the value 0.51, if you round to the nearest integer.
That’s a little bit interesting – it will certainly make people think twice before writing numbers in patents – but it’s been reported in the most fantastically mathematically illiterate fashion in The Independent, by someone who seems to have discovered what ’rounding’ is in the course of their research.
Read: What exactly does ‘one’ mean? Court of Appeal passes judgement on thorny mathematical issue, in The Independent
(Via Tony Mann on Twitter)
Mathesia
No, it’s not what happens when you try to do maths under pressure and forget everything you ever knew about calculus – Mathesia is a new crowdsourcing platform for mathematics, which companies can use to pitch mathematical problems to their collection of maths experts, who can then bid to be awarded the project. It also has a section for universities to advertise research posts.
One thing that does make me sad is that the site extensively uses the word ‘brainies’ to describe the mathematicians, and it looks like the pitchers are adopting this as standard terminology. Bit naff, right?
Hypernom
Vi Hart, Andrea Hawksley, Henry Segerman and Marc ten Bosch each independently have long track records of doing crazy, innovative stuff with maths. Together, they’ve made Hypernom.