Anyone who caught any of this summer’s BBC Proms may have noticed that in the midst of the World’s Greatest Classical Music Festival, someone managed to sneak in a bit of mathematics. Emily Howard, whose degree was in Mathematics and Computing at Oxford, has become a composer whose works are performed alongside Glinka and Shostakovich. I spoke to Emily about her latest composition, Calculus of the Nervous System, which was part of this year’s Prom 51, on 21st August.
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IMA Mathematics 2013 Conference
The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications’s flagship general mathematical interest conference, ‘Mathematics’, is getting ready for its eighth outing in 2013. Mathematics 2013 focuses on the Mathematics of Planet Earth, an international collaboration, including talks on climate, education, energy and demography. The website expresses a hope that
the audience will have mathematicians, those who work with mathematicians in policy forming roles, and anyone who has an interest in developments in the applications of mathematics.
The conference will take place on Thursday 14 March 2013 at Mary Ward House in London. A programme and registration for the conference are available via the website.
Source: IMA Mathematics 2013.
Math/Maths 112: Matt Parker’s Domino Computer
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released.
A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. This week Samuel and Peter spoke to Matt Parker about the inner workings of his Domino Computer for the Manchester Science Festival; and they spoke to each other about: The claimed proof of the ABC conjecture; The astronomical unit gets voted fixed; 3.14159 IN THE SKY; Higgs boson papers published; BAM Einstein on the Beach; Mathblogging.org’s Mathematical Instruments; Steven Strogatz’s Me, Myself and Math; Relatively Prime’s The Toolbox; and more. Get Relatively Prime via relprime.com
Get this episode: Math/Maths 112: Matt Parker’s Domino Computer
Steven Strogatz series on “what math can reveal about us and our world”
Steven Strogatz has begun a six-part series in a New York Times blog. ‘Me, Myself and Math’ apparently “looks at us through the lens of math”. Steven explains that this will focus on
how the subject I love — math — relates to the subject we all love — ourselves.
From the DNA that encodes us, to the fingerprints that characterize us, to our place in the universe and our friend counts on Facebook, we are mathematical marvels. In the coming weeks we’ll see what math can reveal about us and our world, and at the same time, how the wonders of us have inspired advances in math.
The first outing, ‘Singular Sensations‘, discusses the topology in patterns on the body like hair and fingerprints.
Source: Me, Myself and Math.
AU defined as 149,597,870,700 metres
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.
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).