Having discovered this wonderful design for a paper Enigma machine, which uses a standard size crisp tube and does a pretty good job of encoding things like an Enigma machine, I decided it was worth trying it out. What better opportunity to use something which can encode secret messages than to send messages between two monthly Maths Jam events via the medium of Twitter? The public sending of the messages would be incomprehensible to anyone not willing to get their hands dirty with a crisp tube and scissors. Unless they’ve got an actual Enigma machine.
You're reading: Main
Math/Maths 106: Is Aberdeen excited about the horse dancing?
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 about: The Olympics; Friendship Networks and Social Status; Make maths compulsory for all A level students, say Lords; Is Algebra Necessary; Keith Devlin’s MOOC now on Coursera; Matt Parker book; Colors of Math trailer; Golden Ratio Nautilus; Second series of School of Hard Sums in the pipe line; Alan Turing (Statutory Pardon) Bill first reading in House of Lords; and more.
Get this episode: Math/Maths 106: Is Aberdeen excited about the horse dancing?
Google search adds a scientific calculator
Those who know things have known for a while that if you put simple-ish sums like sqrt(4^2+3^2) into Google, it’ll calculate the answer for you. Well, they’ve made life a little bit easier now with the addition of a set of scientific calculator buttons that appear whenever you enter a sum.
Oddly, you can only interact with the calculator by clicking the buttons, not by typing, so it was probably designed with touch devices in mind. It’s also missing an ANS button for using the previous result in further calculation. Anyway, someone’s bound to find it useful when they need a calculator in a pinch.
Get your bespoke artisanal hand-crafted integers here
Brooklyn Integers is “an independently owned and operated integer-as-a-service provider. All integers are hand-crafted and guaranteed to be unique and hella-beautiful”.
Arise, Baronne Daubechies
Ingrid Daubechies, president of the International Mathematical Union, has been made a baroness by the King of Belgium.
The London Pie
EDF Energy, one of the pantheon of Olympics sponsors, has opted to share its love for energy through its ‘Energy of the Nation’ project, launched earlier this week. By monitoring the nation’s positive and negative ‘energy’, by which they mean ‘things they are saying on Twitter’, they’ll turn the London Eye into a giant pie chart each evening at 9pm and display the results of the previous 24 hours’ sentiments over the course of 24 minutes. While my approval of such a large act of data representation is practically off the (pie) chart, I’m interested to find out how it works before judging it either way.
EngageU Recognition of Distinction for Maths Busking
The Maths Busking project recently won a Recognition of Distinction at the EngageU awards. As one of the Maths Busking team, I’d like to shout about this, so here’s a quick interview I had with the project’s director Sara Santos about the award and the project.
What is Maths Busking?
Sara: Maths Busking is a new form of mathematics communication via the medium of street performance.