In an effort to save us from having to write up yet another Alan Turing-based news story, Adam Goucher over at Complex Projective 4-Space has kindly done it for us. Thanks, Adam!
Read: Orchestral Biography of Turing, at Complex Projective 4-Space
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Get a grip on mathematical symbolism with Loughborough University
Here’s yet another intro to mathematical thinking MOOC. Loughborough University, and in particular Professor Tony Croft, is offering a course called “Getting a grip on mathematical symbolism” through the FutureLearn platform. It starts on the 28th of April.
There isn’t much information about the course online yet, apart from the brief description on the official website and this AV-services-tastic trailer:
[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BRUyltBCMU]
Since everything to do with popular maths has to pun (see also: literally any other page on this site), I can only assume that the course will end with the construction of a robotic hand or high-friction surface.
Tony Croft has a good pedigree with online learning resources: for many years he’s been in charge of maths support at Loughborough, including the invaluable mathcentre support site.
More information
Review(ish): Mathbreakers
We were first told about Mathbreakers a few months ago. It was at a very early stage of development, and it wouldn’t run on my PC. Now some time has passed, and I managed to run the most recent version last weekend. I’ve only played the demo, so a full review isn’t fair, but I thought I’d tell you about it in case you want to give it a go.
Warning: this post has like a bajillion animated GIFs in it. Your internet connection will suffer.
Mathbreakers is what I’d call an ‘edutainment’ game, though I think that term’s fallen out of favour. The developers, Imaginary Number Co., say it’s “a video game that teaches math through play”. It’s aimed at school kids, and deals with basic numeracy.
Poetry in Motion
Phil Ramsden gave an excellent talk at the 2013 MathsJam conference, about a particularly mathematical form of poetry. We asked him to write an article explaining it in more detail.
Generals gathered in their masses,
Just like witches at black masses.(Butler et al., “War Pigs”, Paranoid, 1970)
Brummie hard-rockers Black Sabbath have sometimes been derided for the way writer Geezer Butler rhymes “masses” with “masses”. But this is a little unfair. After all, Edward Lear used to do the same thing in his original limericks. For example:
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, “It is just as I feared!-
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!”(“There was an Old Man with a beard”, from Lear, E., A Book Of Nonsense, 1846.)
And actually, the practice goes back a lot longer than that. The sestina is a poetic form that dates from the 12th century, and was later perfected by Dante. It works entirely on “whole-word” rhymes.
Meterfy – numbers for everyone!
Number of dogs in the USA on anti-depressants = 2,800,000 https://t.co/FQkQBG8Cbg
— Mark Miodownik (@markmiodownik) April 4, 2014
A freshly-launched repository for curious, random factoids about numbers: https://t.co/CMj6M3ANLE Browse, and submit your own…
— Alex Bellos (@alexbellos) April 5, 2014
Fans of numbers will be pleased to hear that they now have their own social network. I’m not sure if I mean than numbers do, or fans of numbers do, but either way Meterfy is a newly launched internet website on which you can share, and discover, a huge quantity of numbers – statistics, constants, totals, averages and molar masses abound.
Domputer: the movie
If anyone remembers October 2012 (ahh, those were the days) you might recall we wrote about Aperiodipal Matt Parker, and his crazy project to build a computer out of dominoes. Well, it happened, but not much has happened since – sorting out a video of the event has taken a while. But it’s ready now! And it’s great!
App review: Tydlig, a calculator app for iOS
You may remember that we previously posted about Tydlig, a new calculator app for iOS. We asked if anyone would be interested in writing a review, and Aoife, who’s written the article below, kindly obliged.
Tydlig is a reimagined calculator on iOS and provides an innovative, freeform canvas where multiple calculations can be built and organised in one space. It functions as a scientific calculator, but on an open workspace that you can control, with additional visual features. Elegant in its simplicity, Tydlig captures all of the necessary components of a calculator, while maintaining refined and intelligible functionality.