The Aperiodical 

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Women in Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 20, 2012

At the Royal Society this week, they’ve celebrated Ada Lovelace Day with an Edit-A-Thon of everyone’s favourite The Free Encyclopedia. A group gathered yesterday to hack away at some of Wikipedia’s most neglected entries – those covering famous females. Partly due to the under-representation of women in editing, such articles can be under-developed and/or have a male slant.

While Ada Lovelace’s entry is pretty impressive and full of information about the pioneering mathematician, there are many others worthy of note which haven’t had so much attention. This article in The Guardian describes some examples of pages which need sprucing up, and the planned list of pages to edit can be found here.

Many other events are being planned along similar lines, including this one at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and this one in Manchester. Why not join in and edit some pages yourself?

Nobel prize for economics awarded to a mathematician

By Alistair Bird. Posted October 18, 2012

There may be no Nobel in mathematics, but that needn’t stop mathematicians winning one: Lloyd Shapley has just won the Nobel prize for economics, for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. ((Though technically it’s not a Nobel prize, and actually the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Perhaps Alfred Nobel’s made-up wife also had an affair with a fantastical economist.))

Lloyd Shapley described himself in an Associated Press interview:

“I consider myself a mathematician and the award is for economics. I never, never in my life took a course in economics.”

But if you don’t take his word for it, look on over at his entry on the Mathematics Genealogy Project, and you’ll find his thesis is on “Additive and Non-Additive Set Functions”.

The Nobel prize website has some details on the theory of stable allocations and market design, but an old AMS feature column gives a gentler mathematical introduction, via the elegant graph theory of Hall’s Marriage theorem.

Cushing blogs

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted October 17, 2012

I’m going to abuse this here soapbox I have constructed to do a friend a favour. Here’s the friend, exhibiting typical behaviour:



I’ve mentioned my good friend David Cushing a few times here. I once even managed to record him doing a pretty clever card trick. He sits next to me in our office at Newcastle University’s School of Maths and Stats and when he isn’t doing card tricks he’s usually trying to grab my attention with unusual maths questions (or balloon polyhedra or potentially libellous “facts” about animals).

Reader, I have some good news: you too can share in the glory of David’s existence because he’s started a blog, called The Adventures of David Cushing. He’s already written about a few interesting mathematical factoids and has been asking me all week to post about it here. So please, have a look — you might even find it interesting!

The Calculus of Love, a short film

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted October 15, 2012

 



The Calculus of Love is a short film by writer/director Dan Clifton and starring Keith Allen. The film’s distributor got in touch with us last week to direct our attention toward the film, with the following synopsis:

Mathematics Professor AG Bowers is obsessed with solving the fabled 250 year old Goldbach Conjecture. When a series of mystery letters arrive hinting at a solution, Bowers believes his lifelong dream may at last be within reach.

After being shown at various film festivals, the film is now available to view online. I’ve embedded it below the fold, along with an interview with the film’s director, Dan Clifton.

Math/Maths 116: Non-Euclidean Whales and the Queen in Hyperspace

By Peter Rowlett. Posted October 14, 2012

A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released.

A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. This week Samuel and Peter spoke about: The x-and-y-axes travelling salesman problem: a TSP special case 30-year-old problem solved; The Queen given dominion in hyperspace; The Nobel Prize in Physics 2012; Japanese abacus teacher wins 2012 Mental Calculation World Cup; The Non-Euclidean Geometry of Whales; automated proof of Feit-Thompson Theorem revisited; GeoGebra for tablets (iPad and Android); Penrose Magnets — Brighten Your Life with Magnetic Art; Math Has Never Looked as Pretty as This; TES Maths Podcast 1; When MPs took a maths exam revisited; the next episode of Relatively Prime; and more.

Get this episode: Math/Maths 116: Non-Euclidean Whales and the Queen in Hyperspace

Katie Steckles interviewed on mathblogging.org

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted October 12, 2012

Tip-top maths blog review site mathblogging.org has been running a series of interviews with maths bloggers. I think all three of the Aperiodical triumvirate have taken part, but Katie’s answers were published today. She said some things that made me feel unexpectedly positive about this site, so I’m happy.

I’m sure mine and Peter’s responses will appear in due course. Meanwhile, interviews with Igor Carron, Izabella Laba, Samuel Hansen, David Wees and Christian P. Robert are already online and worth reading.

 

PRIMES-USA

By Katie Steckles. Posted October 8, 2012

PRIMES, it turns out, isn’t just a word for numbers without any proper factors – it’s also a mentoring programme for high school students in the USA, based at MIT. The students visit there once a week from February to May, and work with academics on real research. They also run similar programmes for computer science and computational biology.

The scheme has recently been extended to allow students not local to MIT (or in possession of a private jet or teleporter ((Although if they’ve invented a teleporter, this scheme probably can’t help them much)) ) to attend. PRIMES-USA is a national scheme for students across the country, which requires them to visit MIT for a conference in May, but the rest of the meetings take place via Skype.