In true Aperiodical fashion, we left 13 days before recording another Aperiodcast, so here’s what we think about the last almost-two-weeks on the site.
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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: Math paper retracted because it ‘contains no scientific content’; Top Majors of 2022; New Journals of Negative Results; New UK law obliges publishing of public data in open formats; Frozen primes; Follow the timeline of Alan Turing’s life; TU Munich Cancels Elsevier; Help get Octave developed for Android! (like MATLAB, but free); Open Textbook Catalog; Tony’s Maths Blog; Tika Taka Analysis; Fractal Pancakes; and more. The recording is clear but, though Samuel could hear Peter, although with a time lag, during the episode Peter increasingly couldn’t hear Samuel. Makes for fun times!
Get this episode: Math/Maths 96: Permeated by Robot Noise
A while ago somebody created a simulation of Conway’s Game of Life inside a bigger version of the Game of Life. Now, YouTube user Phillip Bradbury has created a very simple — and aurally pleasing ((the Shepard tone is used to create the illusion of a sound constantly increasing in pitch)) — video showing it in action.
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8]
Apparently this is made possible by the Outer Totalistic Cellular Automata Meta-Pixel (OTCAMP), a “two state programmable unit cell which allows Conway’s Life to simulate any outer totalistic rule. OTCAMP is a meta-cell which is also a meta-pixel. OTCAMP meta-pixels display evolving meta-patterns on-screen in meta-realtime.”
An outer totalistic rule is a rule for a cellular automaton which defines the transitions between cell states based on the total number of switched-on surrounding cells surrounding them. The Game of Life is one such rule.
Source: Richard Elwes on Google+.
A paper published in the January 2010 issue of Computers & Mathematics with Applications which, according to Times Higher Education, “used unspecified computer ‘magnification technology’ to provide the first proof of a Euclidean axiom called the ‘parallel postulate'”, has been withdrawn by the publisher.
A figure 8 knot, a Temari ball with cuboctahedral symmetry and a Klein bottle in the MAA's mathematical petting zoo
The MAA recently displayed a mathematical petting zoo at the USA Science & Engineering Festival, along with a slideshow of pictures from their MAA Found Math collection.
The page about the event doesn’t have any pictures on it but it does have lots of links to the artists and their portfolios. The usual suspects are represented — non-orientable manifolds and polyhedra are in abundance — but there are a couple of unfamiliar objects, and they’re all pleasing to look at and think about.
(via MAA Found Math on Flickr)
The Science Museum in London have created a Facebook timeline of Alan Turing’s life and events afterwards. It’s an excellent use of the new Timeline feature – you can scroll up and down the timeline from Turing’s birth to the current day, which contains plenty on his codebreaking and work with early computers as well as more mundane things like his schooling and the invention of the very first chess-playing computer program. Appropriately, his tragic death is a small footnote to a fascinating life, just a couple of lines. Scrolling back up towards the present, you can see how Turing’s reputation was restored and commemorated, leading up to 2012, the Alan Turing Year.
Some cognitive scientists have done an experiment on some people in Papua New Guinea to test the hypothesis that the number line is based on an in-built intuition that all humans share. They concluded that it isn’t, and that you can use cardinal numbers without placing them mentally on a line.
