Jason Ermer’s Collaborative Mathematics project has launched its first video challenge. The project aims to allow mathematics to happen collaboratively via the medium of online videos, and video responses. The idea is that having watched the challenge video, you work with a group of friends (collaboratively) and post a response video, and then watch others’ response videos, and hopefully somewhere along the line mathematics will happen.
You're reading: News
- how statistics impacts individual lives, improves society, or in general makes the world more a better place
- how statistical thinking can be brought to bear on important issues of our day
- interesting careers in statistics (tell the world why your job in statistics is a great job, or why it is interesting and fun to be a statistician)
Your help needed: survey of international mathematical cultures
Dr Aiping Xu of Coventry University is asking staff who have experience of mathematics education in the UK and other countries to complete a short questionnaire as part of a survey of international mathematical cultures for the Higher Education Academy. The questionnaire explains the purpose of the study.
A growing number of international students study mathematics at UK universities. Although mathematics itself may be the same the world over, the subject is learnt within a cultural setting and different countries have different mathematical cultures. The purpose of this project is to try to identify key ways in which the mathematical culture of other countries differs from that in the UK, so that both academic staff and students can be made more aware of these differences and so that appropriate induction can be provided.
I am told the questionnaire should take no more than 15 minutes to complete.
Take the survey: Investigation of international mathematical cultures.
GCSE switch-off is off
The BBC are reporting that plans to change key subjects, including mathematics, from the current GCSE assessment system to a new, tougher ‘English Baccalaureate Certificate’ and to have a single exam board for each subject are “to be abandoned”.
Further information: Planned switch from GCSEs to Baccalaureate in England ‘abandoned’ at BBC News.
Chrome no longer supports MathML
Recently we reported that Chrome has added support for MathML, a good method for representing maths on the web. Now a comment on a discussion about enabling MathML in Chromium, the open source web browser project from which Google Chrome draws its source code, has announced that this feature will be turned off, for now. The comment, from user meh@chromium.org yesterday, says:
Note that MathML has had to be turned off because the code is not yet production ready.
We hope to turn it on in some future release. We plan to announce this in the Chrome 25 release notes.
Earlier today user isherman@chromium.org posted this clarification:
To summarize the current status of this bug: We’d like to enable MathML in Chrome, but the WebKit code still needs further improvements before we can ship it.
Further information: Enabling support for MathML.
More experimental evidence for the infinitude of the primes
In a classic example of the intersection between maths and news, there’s been a new Mersenne prime discovered! Mersenne primes are numbers of the form $2^p – 1$, where $p$ is a prime number. They’re highly valued as a source of large prime numbers, since testing the primality of a (suspected) prime of this form is much easier than for general prime numbers.
The invariant subspace problem is still a problem
Recently we reported that Eva Gallarda and Carl Cowen had announced they had a proof of the invariant subspace conjecture for Hilbert spaces.
Well, yesterday they announced at the blog Café Matemático that there was a problem with their proof:
International Year of Statistics Video Contest
In case you’d already forgotten, 2013 is the International Year of Statistics (I had; turns out Katie told us about it just after the New Year). One of the many activities going on is a video contest sponsored by the publishers Wiley.
Take it away, Wiley!
We invite videos of four minutes in length or less that illustrate
Prizes of $250 to $1000 will be awarded for the best videos, with special prizes for “the best videos by a person or persons 18 years of age or less and the best non-English language videos”.
Submissions must be received by February the 28th, so get rolling.