Raymond Johnson, a mathematics education graduate student, has started a wiki to “bring greater visibility and connectedness to mathematics education research.” The blurb on the site’s front page does a good job of explaining itself, so I’ll just repeat it here.
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Aperiodcast – MathsJam 2013!
We haven’t done one of these for absolutely ages. Since all three of us were at the big MathsJam conference a couple of weekends ago, we decided to introduce a local minimum into the fun curve by sitting down and talking about how this site’s doing.
Actually, we ended up talking about the MathsJam baking competition for absolutely ages.
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Review: X&Y
If you have ever wanted to see Marcus du Sautoy reduced in size and placed in a laundry bag, then this is the mathematical play for you!
Ada Lovelace Day Book out now
Ada Lovelace Day was on 15th October this year. It’s an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths, comprising blog posts about women scientists as well as live events around the world.
The nice people at FindingAda.com, the home of the Ada Lovelace Day project, have collated a set of essays on famous (and those perhaps unfairly overlooked) women in science, celebrating their contribution to many different areas, and telling their stories. The resulting book is called “A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention”. Maths is certainly represented: as well as being part of a project named after a woman famously involved in mathematics, the book also contains (awkward plug ahead) a chapter on the mathematician Kathleen Ollerenshaw, written by the Aperiodical’s own Katie Steckles (me).
The book is available to buy as an eBook from the Finding Ada website for £5.99.
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Buy the book: A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention
Dark days for MathML support in browsers
For a brief moment at the start of the year, Google’s Chrome browser could render mathematical notation written in MathML. Since then, things have got worse for mathematics on the web.
In February, the MathML rendering code was removed by Google, citing concerns about security and code quality. Now, a member of the Chromium team has announced that Google will not be supporting MathML in the foreseeable future:
MathML is not something that we want at this time. We believe the needs of MathML can be sufficiently met by libraries like MathJax and doesn’t need to be more directly supported by the platform. In areas where libraries like MathJax are not good enough, we’d love to hear feedback about what APIs we would need to expose so that MathJax, et al, can create an awesome MathML implementation.
Peter Krautzberger, manager of the MathJax project, is not happy.
The arXiv has enabled MathJax!
A bit of slightly overdue but welcome news: the arXiv has enabled MathJax on paper abstract pages. Authors have regularly been using LaTeX syntax in their titles and abstracts, but now the arXiv typesets them automatically for you.
All Squared, Number 10: Maths journalism
Evelyn Lamb is a professional mathematician who has taken up journalism on the side. She received the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship last year, and spent the summer writing for the magazine Scientific American. We talked to her about maths journalism, the challenges involved in making advances accessible to a wider audience, and the differences between blogging and print journalism.
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