[vimeo url=http://vimeo.com/40641882]
Peter’s site is full of beautifully stark geometric/topological art
[vimeo url=http://vimeo.com/40641882]
Peter’s site is full of beautifully stark geometric/topological art
I was going to save this for an Aperiodical Round Up but it’s such a good thing I thought I’d post it straight away. Project Gutenberg has moved on from offering just plain-text transcriptions of books: volunteers have been outstandingly generous with their time and produced LaTeX versions of many maths books, producing versions that are considerably more readable and resemble the original editions much more closely.
Not all the books in that list have been converted to LaTeX yet. Of those that have, GH Hardy’s A Course of Pure Mathematics leaps out as a good place to start. Compare it with this book still in HTML format to see the difference.
(via reddit)
Plus Magazine have launched a new careers section. Aimed at teachers, students, career advisors and parents, the section offers a glimpse of where maths can take you. For a long time these have been the best sources of careers advice for mathematics in the UK so a collaboration should be very fruitful.
This gives information on the wide range of careers that use mathematics – from avalanche research and planning the Olympics to designing computer games or saving lives in developing countries – containing career profiles and in-depth career interviews, as well as advice from employers and information on how to enter a career with maths.
The new careers section is a collaboration between Plus and the MathsCareers website, which was developed by the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the London Mathematical Society and the Royal Statistical Society.
An article in Ars Technica reports on an investigation of the area and ages of volcanic calderas and the duration of volcanic eruptions between 1900 and 2009 in relation to Benford’s Law.
Apparently Benford’s laws fit the eruption duration data “very well” and caldera areas offer “pretty good” fit, though the latter indicated that “some excessive rounding may have taken place”. The caldera eruption ages showed a marked deviation.
Barry Cooper, Professor of Pure Mathematics at Leeds and Chair of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee, writes in the Guardian a personal account of an interest in Turing and his efforts to get the limited edition biography written by Turing’s mother Sara republished.
Written from a mother’s viewpoint, Sara provides a unique insight into the early years of Turing, with candid descriptions such as, “In dress and habits he tended to be slovenly. His hair was usually too long, with an overhanging lock which he would toss back with a jerk of his head.” But the book is full of brilliant treasures, anecdotal accounts of Turing’s eccentricity and genius, and insights into his science.
Source: De-coding the Turing family.
An article on the BBC News website outlines methods for determining numbers used in measures of biodiversity loss, such as the claim by the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2007 that we are “experiencing the greatest wave of extinction since the disappearance of the dinosaurs”. One problem, the BBC explains, is that
No-one knows how many species exist. And if we don’t know a species exists, we won’t miss it when it’s gone.
The BBC reports that two papers by Alan Turing, believed to have been written while he was working at Bletchley Park, have been released by GCHQ. The papers, ‘The Applications of Probability to Crypt’, and ‘Paper on the Statistics of Repetitions’, apparently use mathematical analysis to try and determine which are the more likely Enigma settings so that they can be tried as quickly as possible.
The article quotes “a GCHQ mathematician” saying that GCHQ had now “squeezed the juice” out of the two papers and was “happy for them to be released into the public domain”, but that the fact that the contents had been restricted “shows what a tremendous importance it has in the foundations of our subject”. The two papers are now available to view at the National Archives at Kew, west London.
Source: Alan Turing papers on code breaking released by GCHQ.