A group called Pyraloons set themselves the challenge of building the world’s biggest Sierpiński tetrahedron from balloons. And they succeeded! I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:
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Breaking: Peter Rowlett has submitted his doctoral thesis
Peter Rowlett, editor-at-large of this site, has submitted his PhD thesis. More news as it arrives.
How to Win at Pointless
For the benefit of overseas readers, or British readers in full-time employment, I should briefly explain the concept of daytime TV quiz phenomenon Pointless. The pinnacle of British public service broadcasting, it’s shown at 5.15pm every weekday on BBC One and is hosted by Alexander Armstrong of comedy double-act Armstrong & Miller, and Richard Osman of comedy double-act Armstrong & Osman. We shall investigate how we can use maths to analyse the show, improve our chances of winning it, and ultimately perhaps improve the show itself.
The aim of the game is in each round to give the most obscure correct answer to a given question. Each question ($Q$) has a large set of valid answers $A_Q$, questions perhaps asking contestants to name “Films starring Bruce Willis” or “Countries without an O in their name”. All the questions have been asked to 100 members of the public prior to the quiz (call this set $P$), and they each have 100 seconds to name as many examples as they can (giving rise to a set $A_p\subseteq A_Q$ for each $p\in P$. The contestant gets a point for every one of the 100 people who named their answer $a$:
\[ \mbox{score}(a) = \begin{cases}
| \{p\in P : a\in A_p \} | & \mbox{if}\ a\in A_Q \\
100 & \mbox{if}\ a\not\in A_Q.
\end{cases} \]
So an obvious answer like Die Hard or France will score a lot of points, and an obscure answer like Striking Distance or Central African Republic will score fewer points. Points are bad (hence the title) so it’s better to dredge up an obscure answer than stick with something safe. However an incorrect answer like Avatar or Mexico scores the maximum 100 points. At the end of the round the contestant with the most points is eliminated.
Not mentioned recently on The Aperiodical
Summer is a busy time for this site’s hard-working triumvirate, so we haven’t been keeping on top of the news as much as we’d like. There’s been some quite interesting news, so here’s a quick round-up of the most important bits:
MathsJam Conference Website: Nice
Maths news, of a sort! The MathsJam conference, which takes place in November and brings together recreational maths nuts from all over the UK and world, has now got a new improved website.
MathsJam is a monthly pub night for maths fans, where people can come together and share puzzles, games, problems or anything they think is cool or interesting. It meets in over 30 locations worldwide, on the same date, the second-to-last Tuesday of the month. It’s also an annual conference, now in its fourth year.
The new website was launched on Sunday, and as well as being a place where you can find out about booking for the conference and see details of the weekend, you can also find a full list of past conference talks – titles, blurbs and links to slides where possible. So, if you find yourself trying to remember something amazing which you think someone talked about at the MathsJam conference, you can now find it there.
The conference website can be found at www.mathsjam.com/conference. To find out more about the monthly MathsJams, visit www.mathsjam.com.
Another open source textbook
Recognising a good idea when he sees one, William Stein has put the source code to his Springer-published undergraduate textbook Elementary Number Theory: Primes, Congruences, and Secrets: A Computational Approach on GitHub.
The book introduces classical elementary number theory and elliptic curves, with lots of Sage code to encourage you to play around with the structures involved. If you want a physical copy, you can still get one from Springer-Verlag for £29.99.
If you don’t already know Stein, he’s the director of the Sage project to create a viable open source alternative to software such as Mathematica and Maple. At the moment he’s working on cloud.sagemath.com, a browser-based Sage environment hosted in the cloud. I think it’s pretty good!
Get the source code: Elementary Number Theory: Primes, Congruences, and Secrets on GitHub.
Announced by William Stein on Google+.
A bit of midweek fun: ANCIENT GREEK GEOMETRY
This is a fun game to while away the midweek blues. You’re presented with two dots. You can drag between dots to create lines and circles, as if you had a straightedge and compass. Apart from a few challenges to get you thinking, that’s pretty much it!
The game was created by Nico Disseldorp, who has a few more fun things on his website, Science vs Magic.
Play: ANCIENT GREEK GEOMETRY