This organ’s benevolent editing triumvirate is making its way to a conference centre outside Crewe this weekend for our AGM, which happens to coincide this year with the big MathsJam conference. If you’re going as well, please do say hello, and if you’re not, keep an eye on each of our Twitter feed @aperiodical and the #MathsJam hashtag. We’re going to be trying to tweet along with most of what’s happening, as will most of the other 100 attendees, and we’re going to have some good posts lined up for the coming weeks based on what we see there.
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Executive Summaries from Less than Successful Research Proposals
A new post is available over at Second-Rate Minds by Samuel Hansen.
Funerary-Network Analysis(July 15th, 2012) Social Network analysis is a hot topic within both mathematics and the social sciences, but all of the research thus far has focused on identifying networks that exist within current communities. This leaves the majority of social networks that have …
Read the full post: “Executive Summaries from Less than Successful Research Proposals“
Recreational Maths Seminar – Picture-hanging puzzles
I hosted the first (proper) Aperiodical recreational maths seminar yesterday. We discussed the paper Picture-hanging puzzles, by Demaine et al. Click through to watch the YouTube recording of the session.
Dara O Briain: School of Hard Sums to return; maths students sought to take part
A tweet purporting to be ((Yes, I know, but it was retweeted by Thomas Woolley, who should know.)) from the press office of UKTV, the company that owns the channel Dave, has confirmed that the TV show Dara O Briain: School of Hard Sums is to return for a second series (we at least thought we knew this in July). It also says that production company Wild Rover are looking for maths students to take part. The tweet asks you to email maths@wild-rover.com to express an interest. You might remember that the first series, which aired in April-June, did very well compared with other programmes on the channel.
Not mentioned on The Aperiodical last week
The way the news section of this site works is, the three of us send in links throughout the week to stories we’ve seen. They go into a section of the site’s backend titled “anyone can edit”, which is code for “someone else please write this up.” It tends to fill up until one of us takes a day, typically a Friday, to run through it and write up as many news stories as they can manage before finger cramps or brain blockages kick in.
This ad hoc news coverage system tends to mean that we miss quite a few big stories, because they take time to research and present in a form we’d be happy with. There are also times when it’s quite hard to tell whether something that’s big in the mainstream press is actually worthwhile, or the result of a canny university PR department framing something uninteresting in a way that will grab editors’ attentions.
On top of all of this, we haven’t been particularly good neighbours so far: there’s a lot of good maths blogging going on around the world, and we’ve been a bit of a closed shop so far.
So what we thought we should do is write a post at the end of each week quickly mentioning the things we didn’t get round to covering, or decided not to cover, and throw in some links to good maths posts we’ve seen elsewhere. Here’s the first one of those.
US high school mathematics teacher Liz Ratliff is going to the South Pole with the IceCube neutrino observatory under a programme called PolarTREC (Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating). You can follow her adventures on her online journal, in the most recent post of which she describes the theoretical background behind the IceCube facility (“basically a giant telescope buried under the ice at the South Pole”). (This story via Samuel Hansen on Math/Maths 120.)
New Scientist published a piece ‘Mathematical proof reveals magic of Ramanujan’s genius‘, about Ken Ono’s (unpublished) work on modular forms.
And, of course, the big news this week, to which we felt we had little to contribute, was the work of Nate Silver in predicting the outcome of the US Election.Some was more triumphant, such as Mashable’s ‘Triumph of the Nerds: Nate Silver Wins in 50 States‘ or the xkcd comic ‘Math‘, and some were more in the mode of sober reflection, such as The Baseline Scenario’s ‘A Few Thoughts on Nate Silver‘, which offers “as Daniel Engber pointed out, the fact that Obama won (and that Silver called all fifty states correctly) doesn’t prove that Silver is a genius any more than Obama’s losing would have proven that he was a fraud”, with some discussion of how probabilistic forecasting should be treated.
Some drew wider conclusions about the state of mathematics and numeracy in the general public, like the Cocktail Party Physics blog’s ‘Why Math is Like the Honey Badger: Nate Silver Ascendant‘. How did he do it? There’s a good piece on More or Less still available via iPlayer Radio, and the GrrlScientist blog offers ‘How did Nate Silver predict the US election?‘ Felix Salmon wrote about Nate’s ability to cast his predictions in a compelling narrative in ‘When quants tell stories‘. But the definitive account of how his process works is given by the site Is Nate Silver a Witch?
Nate himself offers a roundup of ‘Which Polls Fared Best (and Worst) in the 2012 Presidential Race‘.
Considering PhD research in mathematics in 2013? LMS Prospects in Mathematics meeting
The LMS Prospects in Mathematics meeting will take place in Manchester, 18-19 December 2012. This meeting is for people “considering applying for Ph.D. studies in Mathematics for entry in 2013”. Funding is available to provide accommodation for around 50 participants and to help cover their cost of travelling to Manchester. The conference website has further details and explains that
the conference has the goal to introduce the many and varied opportunities for research in mathematics that exist at universities in the UK. Speakers will share their passion about mathematical research by describing the type of questions they are working on, and will discuss where their research topic is being actively studied in the UK. Moreover, information about the Doctoral Training Centres in Mathematical Sciences and funding opportunities will be available.
More information: LMS Prospects in Mathematics.
Education reform in England: new initiatives and changes announced
It’s shaping up to be a busy month for education reform in England. Here’s some news in brief.