In our traditional mode of picking apart the programmes of upcoming science festivals to make sure they’re doing their maths homework, here’s a round-up of the mathematicial goodies on offer at the upcoming Manchester Science Festival, running from 22nd October – 1st November at venues across Manchester.
Some mathematicians at Harvard have formed an organisation called “Gender inclusivity in mathematics”, which is dedicated to “creating a community of mathematicians particularly welcoming to women interested in math and reducing the gender gap in Harvard’s math department.”
They’re running a series of talks by invited speakers and discussion events, and hope to run a conference on women in mathematics this academic year.
More information: Gender inclusivity in mathematics at Harvard
via Nalini Joshi on Twitter
The National Numeracy campaign, a British charity aiming to improve numeracy in adults as well as children, has relaunched its Parent Toolkit as the Family Maths Toolkit. It contains advice for parents on promoting good attitudes towards maths, as well as ideas for activities to get the whole family enthused and practised in maths. There’s also a section with information to help school teachers support parental engagement with maths.
Visit: Family Maths Toolkit
Khan Academy has partnered with Pixar to produce a subsection of their site which explains some of the maths involved in computer animation. There are the usual videos explaining individual topics, but also plenty of interactive diagrams so you can play along at home. It’s also nice to see some “Get to know …” videos, which present real animators who work at Pixar, talking about why they got into computer animation.
Visit: Pixar in a Box, at Khan Academy
Terence Tao has just uploaded a preprint to the arXiv with a claimed proof of the Erdős discrepancy problem.
The organisation behind the Breakthrough Prize has announced a competition aimed at school-age kids, called the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, which encourages them to get excited about maths and science, and to make a 10-minute video explaining a challenging concept – which can be an existing bit of research, or something they’ve done themselves.
I am now one of the editors of MSOR Connections, a peer-reviewed practitioner journal that welcomes research articles, case studies and opinion pieces relating to innovative learning, teaching, assessment and support in mathematics, statistics and operational research in higher education.
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’.
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.