The astronomical unit (AU), which Nature News calls “the rough distance from the Earth to the Sun” and Wikipedia refers to as “the average distance between the Earth and the Sun (roughly speaking)”, has been defined as fixed at 149,597,870,700 metres. This standard was adopted by unanimous vote at the International Astronomical Union’s meeting in Beijing in August 2012.
You're reading: Main
Mathblogging.org ‘Mathematical Instruments’: interviews with mathematical bloggers
The Mathblogging.org blog has a new series of posts, ‘Mathematical Instruments’, highlighting mathematical bloggers. The posts take the form of an interview in which the subject answers questions about their blog and blogging in general. The first post explains that this will
let bloggers tell you a little bit about themselves. We call it “Mathematical Instruments” because we see blogging as a valuable addition to the toolbox for research and education. But it is still fairly new and sometimes gets overlooked or dismissed by people who don’t know what to use it for.
The idea of these short interviews is that we can learn a little more about how this instrument can be used, and meet some of the people who are already using it.
The first two are Igor Carron of Nuit Blanche and Izabella Laba of The Accidental Mathematician.
Source and more posts (in time): Mathematical Instruments.
Higgs boson discovery passes peer review
The discovery of the Higgs boson, which “completes the standard model [of particle physics]” according to New Scientist, has passed peer review. Two papers, from the two experiments which each contributed to the discovery, have been published in Volume 716, Issue 1 (17 September 2012) of Physics Letters B, the same journal as Peter Higgs’ original paper which proposed the existence of a “mass-giving boson”. Despite declaring the standard model complete, the New Scientist piece says it is “lacking” and welcomes “the hunt for new physics”. Both papers are “Universally Available” at Science Direct (links below).
Source: Higgs boson gets peer-review seal of approval (New Scientist).
Papers:
Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC (ATLAS Collaboration, 2012, Physics Letters B, 1-29);
Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC (CMS Collaboration, 2012, Physics Letters B, 30-61).
#MTT2K: Teachers critique Khan Academy
Pretty much everyone has an opinion about learning, and the teaching that causes, impedes or just precedes it. Sal Khan famously just started making videos with the aim of helping people learn, without paying much attention to the hows and whys of pedagogy. That means that pretty much everyone has an opinion about Sal’s site, Khan Academy. Recently some teachers and educationalists held a competition for “the best video commentary on a Khan Academy video” to “encourage math educators to create videos that help their peers bring a critical eye to the Khan series”.
(So this post has been in our news queue since June, when the #mtt2k competition started. The winners were announced a fortnight ago. I let it sit there for so long because we make a point of not being about education here. We didn’t cover the whole “Is Algebra Necessary” thing because of the sheer inanity and tendentiousness of it all. The videos produced for #mtt2k are interesting, though, so here’s the post I should’ve written at least two weeks ago.)
Rubik’s Tube
Numberphile filmmaker and general internet legend Brady Haran has been busy putting together a series of YouTube videos about the Rubik’s cube, with contributions from Aperiodical friends Matt Parker and James Grime. The videos also feature lots of solving clips sent in by viewers, and Aperiodical Editor triumvir and sometime maths-talker-abouter Katie Steckles (that’s me) occasionally pops in to make comments and state facts which are no longer true (a world record was broken 4 days after filming).
Science Lives profile of Robert MacPherson
Just quickly, here’s something I saw on MetaFilter and enjoyed. The Simons Foundation has a “Science Lives” series of “extended interviews with some of the giants of twentieth century mathematics and science”.
This one is with Robert MacPherson, who invented instersection homology with Mark Goresky. I’d never heard of him and topology gives me the heebie-jeebs, but I’ve spent a very happy morning reading the fascinating biography and listening to the interview. The interviewer is Robert L. Bryant, also a research mathematician, so the questions don’t stray away from difficult topics. MacPherson comes across as an all-round excellent guy; I really recommend playing through all the clips when you have some time.
ACMEScience NEWS NOW ep 2: Sally Dodson-Robinson
Samuel Hansen is a busy man. As well as finishing off Relatively Prime, he’s continually making up new ideas for podcasts. His latest effort is ACMEScience NEWS NOW ((yes, the title has more capitals than a particularly pillarific Medieval cathedral, but that seems to be the way Sam is doing things)), a series of video interviews with the people behind scientific and mathematical research stories in the news.
We didn’t post about episode 1, with Paul Hines talking about crowdsourcing, due to it coming out in that weird bit of the Summer where all three of us fell asleep for a few weeks. But last night Sam posted episode 2 — an interview with Sally Dodson-Robinson about modelling planet formation — so here it is:
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_DT6jK8bj0]
You can subscribe to the ACMEScience NEWS NOW channel on its YouTube page.