Radio 4 maths police More or Less took time off from calling out journalists and deputy prime ministers for their misuse of statistics this series to sneak a hidden maths puzzle into their show. The first five episodes were “brought to us by” the numbers, respectively, 1, 49, 100, 784 and 1444. Listeners were invited to work out what number would bring us the final episode.
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Integer sequence puzzle in More or Less
More or Less, the BBC’s maths and statistics radio show, has been sneakily doing a puzzle on us for the last few weeks. The episodes in the series so far have each been ‘brought to you’, Sesame Street-style, by a different number. But what will the final episode be? Can you crack the integer code and solve the puzzle?
The puzzle was announced in the programme broadcast on the 27th of September; you can listen to it on the Radio 4 site or as a podcast (the puzzle bit is at 27:05). If you think you’ve solved the riddle, email More or Less through their website.
The episodes so far have been brought to you by the numbers 1, 49, 100, 784 and 1444. (It’s not in the OEIS; we’ve checked). You can find out if you’re right when the final episode in the series goes out, on BBC Radio 4 at 4.30pm on Friday 4th October.
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An enneahedron for Herschel
The building where I work is named after Alexander Stewart Herschel. I suspect this is because it used to be the home of the physics department, since he was an astronomer, but it works for us too because he also has a pretty cool graph named after him.
An embedding of the Herschel graph in the plane
Helpfully, it’s called the Herschel graph. It’s the smallest non-Hamiltonian polyhedral graph – you can’t draw a path on it that visits each vertex exactly once, but you can make a polyhedron whose vertices and edges correspond with the graph exactly. It’s also bipartite – you can colour the vertices using two colours so that edges only connect vertices of different colours. The graph’s automorphism group – its symmetries – is $D_6$, the symmetry group of the hexagon. That means that there’s threefold rotational symmetry, as well as a couple of lines of reflection. It’s hard to see the threefold symmetry in the usual diagram of the graph, but it’s there!
Anyway, at the start of the summer, one of the lecturers here, Dr Michael White, told me about this graph and asked if we could work out how to construct the corresponding polyhedron. Making a polyhedron is quite simple – take the diagram on the Wikipedia page, pinch the middle and pull up – but it would be really nice if you could make a polyhedron which has the same symmetries as the graph.
MathsJam Conference 2013: early-bird discount has ended
Unlike good news websites, we’re reporting this after it’s useful: if you wanted to book for this year’s MathsJam annual conference at the discounted 10% off early-bird rate, you’re now NOT able to do so. However, there are still a few places left, although not many, so if you do want to join in with a weekend of fun maths and hanging out with cool people, you should get in there as quickly as possible.
The MathsJam conference takes place on the weekend of 2-3 November, 2013. Between now and then, there’s only one monthly pub-based MathsJam meetup, which will be on 22nd October in a pub near you.
As if that weren’t enough, there’s even more opportunities to Jam with Maths, in particular if you happen to be in or near Manchester. The Manchester Science Festival takes place in October, and there’ll be an extra one-off big MathsJam in Manchester during the festival, which will take place on 29th October (yes, that’s between the monthly Jam and the conference). The people of Manchester can’t get enough maths, it seems, and if you’re in the area or will be for the science festival, feel free to join them for a night of lighting talks, celebrity spotting and maths puzzles. For more information, visit the Manchester Science Festival website, or read the same copy on the MathsJam site.
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All Squared, Number 7: Card Magic (Colm Mulcahy part 1)
Colm Mulcahy is an original Aperiodical contributor (Aperiodicontributor?) and friend of the site. He’s spent the last year and a bit writing his new book, Mathematical Card Magic: Fifty-Two New Effects. It came out a few weeks ago, so we thought it was a good opportunity to talk to him and find out just what’s so great about mathematical magic tricks.
Actually, we had that thought quite a while ago and if we’d been the least bit organised this podcast would’ve come out the same day as the book. As it happened, we first arranged to talk to Colm back in May, and then it took literally three months before we actually managed to record the interview.
… And then it took us three weeks to edit it up and upload it. Sorry!
Because Colm had so much interesting stuff to say, we’ve split the interview into two parts. In this first half we talk about the book and mathematical card magic; in the second part, out next week, we talk about Martin Gardner and the Celebration of Mind.
Mathematical Card Magic: Fifty-Two New Effects is published by CRC Press, priced £19.99/$29.95.
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Rubik’s Cube in Minecraft
The last time we posted about Minecraft, someone had made a scientific and graphing calculator. But now someone’s made something actually useful: a Rubik’s cube!
Mastercrafter SethBling uploaded this video showing his fully-working Rubik’s cube, created entirely from standard Minecraft blocks:
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUEUuurc9u4]
Download the world: SethBling’s RubiksCube
Visual Insight by John Baez
John Baez, the very first maths blogger, has started a new blog called Visual Insight. It’s hosted by the American Mathematical Society and is “a place to share striking images that help explain advanced topics in mathematics.”
So that’ll be nice.