The nice chaps at Kitki, an educational board game company based in India, have come up with a cool idea for a mathematical board game. They’re funding it through IndieGoGo (which if you haven’t heard of it is a bit like Kickstarter), and they’re looking for your help.
This post popped into our news queue just before Christmas, and was forgotten about thanks to the seasonal good cheer. Well, it’s 2015 now, and our Nonsense Formula Disapprove-o-Matic is beeping angrily. We still can’t muster up enough enthusiasm to properly dig into this, so I’ve just tidied up the links I collected earlier on.
Eugenia Cheng (of nonsense formulas passim) has “found” the formula for the perfect doughnut, for Domino’s Pizza. Coincidentally, they’ve recently started selling doughnuts.
Actually, “formula” should be in quotes as well – the “formula” she gives is, drumroll…
\[ \frac{(r-2)^2}{4(r-1)} \]
Note that that’s not a formula.
This year’s Oscars ceremony, which will take place on 22nd February, will honour those who’ve achieved greatness in film-making, performance, scoring, sound and production. You may not know that in addition to the main ceremony, the Academy also has an untelevised award ceremony taking place two weeks earlier, called the Academy Scientific and Technical Awards (nerd Oscars).
These awards recognise achievement in the field of scientific and technological advancements related to film-making, and have in the past been awarded to a variety of different advancements, including Dolby Surround Sound, the Xenon Arc lamp, IMAX and even Jim Henson’s animatronic muppet technology.
This year though, finally seeing sense, the Academy’s Technical Achievement award goes to a mathematician. Robert Bridson, who’s worked on CGI-heavy films including Gravity, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Adventures of Tin Tin, has been recognised for his work on “early conceptualization of sparse-tiled voxel data structures and their application to modelling and simulation.”
Project organisers José and David
If you enjoyed the magnificent ridiculousness of Matt Parker’s MegaMenger international fractal building project, but would prefer something slightly lower-dimensional, we’ve found the collaborative international fractal-building project for you!
A team led by José L. Rodríguez at the University of Almería, in Spain (who also built a Menger Sponge for MegaMenger) are attempting to build a giant Sierpiński carpet, using green and purple stickers, and an army of unwitting excited school children.
We haven’t properly mentioned until now that The London Mathematical Society is 150 years old this year. You can’t gather a whole society of mathematicians together without one or two of them noticing that 150 is a nice round number, and some form of celebration is in order.
It’s time to reveal the results of our search for the best maths pun of 2014.
First of all, a startling number of you seemed unclear as to what a pun is. Yet others seemed not to notice that we were asking for new puns, so we had to rule those out as well. After ruling out all the invalid entries, we were still left with a few dozen workable puns, so there was plenty to consider.
Below are the results, along with comments from our awards committee (Peter, Katie, Paul and Christian, along with guest celebri-judges Matt Parker, Steve Mould and James Grime, who happened to be nearby at the time).
Congratulations to everyone who gets a mention, and of course to our absolute favourite, the winner. Which will be revealed at the end, after you’ve read all the not-quite-as-good ones, obviously.
It’s time for our traditional trawl through the New Years Honours list for mentions of “mathematics”, hoping that better-informed readers will fill in the people this crude method has missed. I’ve found the following names: