I don’t really intend this to be an advert but for a while now I’ve half intended to pick up a copy of John Graham-Cumming’s The Geek Atlas. I just bought a DRM-free ebook half price as part of an International Day Against DRM promotion.
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Protection of Freedoms Act 2012
One of the reasons given against a pardon for Alan Turing in a November 2011 blog post by John Graham-Cumming (who successfully campaigned for a Turing apology in 2009) was that the Protection of Freedoms bill, if passed, would make a pardon unnecessary. This is because this
specifically allows for the disregarding of convictions under the old law that was used against Turing. Once disregarded the law causes their convictions to be deleted. It’s not quite the same thing as a pardon, but its effect is to lift the burden of a criminal record from these living men.
Now the bill has gained Royal Assent, becoming the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. A short piece in The Independent calls this “a freedom too late” for Alan Turing. The Turing pardon e-petition now has over 33,000 signatures.
Source: Protection of Freedoms Bill.
Wikipedia adds MathJax display option
According to a post by Frédéric Wang on the Mozilla MathML mailing list, Wikipedia now supports rendering mathematics via MathJax (and through it, MathML). Wang says:
Today, a new Math rendering mode has been added to Wikipedia. You need a Wikipedia account to use it. In My preferences => Appearance => Math, choose “MathJax”. Once enabled, MathJax’s HTML-CSS output will be used by default. If you want to use MathML instead, right click on a formula and choose “Math Settings => Math Renderer => MathML”.
Feminine role models found to not motivate girls to study maths
Diana Betz and Denise Sekaquaptewa conducted two studies in the USA into attempts to counter stereotypes, reported in a University of Michigan press release.
Mathematical thinking and religious belief
According to this paper, published this week in Science, and described in this article from Psychology Today, the answer you give to the following simple maths question is a predictor of whether or not you are likely to be religious:
Q: If a baseball and bat cost $\$110$, and the bat costs $\$100$ more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?
City & Guilds survey on views of maths – says more about media stereotyping?
A survey of 3000 pupils aged from seven to 18 for City & Guilds is reported by the BBC to have found that “maths lessons are seen as difficult, irrelevant and boring by about a third of teenagers” and that the subject could be “geared more towards real life”, but that “most agreed that maths would be useful once they had left school”.
Saharon Shelah has written more than 1000 papers
From David Roberts on Google+:
Saharon Shelah, the well-known Israeli set-theorist and logician, has passed 1000 papers!
http://shelah.logic.at/listb.html
The page was updated with a rush of almost twenty papers, taking him over the line. Notably, paper #1000 is not listed. +Richard Elwes and I were wondering what the topic of this (rather artificial) milestone paper would be.
Every now and then, when finding a citation for a paper, you come across one of these giants of prolificacy and their unreasonably long lists of publications. It makes me wonder why I don’t just give up and let them discover all the maths.
Shelah was the first recipient of the Erdős Prize and he is certainly following in the great man’s footsteps – though he’s still got a way to go before he can think about beating Erdős’s approximately (can’t blame him for losing count) 1525 publications.