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!
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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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Prime gaps update
There’s been some progress on the bounded gaps between primes front since we last checked in.
The Polymath8 project has got the gap down to $4,680$. But that’s small beans: James Maynard, a postgrad student at Oxford, announced at a meeting in Oberwolfach that he has got the gap down to $700$. Emmanuel Kowalski has written an effusive post on his blog singing the praises of Maynard’s achievement.
iSquared Magazine available for free download
I am delighted to report that the IMA and the National STEM Centre have made all twelve issues of iSquared Magazine available as PDFs for free download for the first time. The magazine was produced as a print-only publication by Sarah Shepherd from 2007-10.