At the MathsJam weekend gathering earlier this month, we found ourselves invited to join maths podcasting supremo Samuel Hansen for a recording session. Nothing unusual there: podcasts have been recorded at MathsJam before. But this time Samuel wanted to record more than one podcast at the same time – since many of the maths podcasting community were present, it seemed like a good plan to grab anyone who wasn’t already doing something else and record something quite unlike any podcast you’ve ever heard.
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- The line may be straight or curved, but must not touch or cross itself or any other line.
- The new spot cannot be placed on top of one of the endpoints of the new line. Thus the new spot splits the line into two shorter lines.
- No spot may have more than three lines attached to it. For the purposes of this rule, a line from the spot to itself counts as two attached lines and new spots are counted as having two lines already attached to them.
For teachers and students, and anyone else really, the wonderful NRICH produce two advent calendars of great activity ideas – one for Primary and one for Secondary.- Friend of the site and Chalkdust honcho Matthew Scroggs produces an advent calendar of torturous puzzles on his website. In last year’s calendar, each day had a number puzzle and there was an overall logic puzzle connecting them all. We can’t wait to see what happens this year!
Based on a daft suggestion, I made this printable calendar a few years ago, which assuming you open the correct window each day maintains complete accuracy and also the appropriate level of excitement (there’s an exclamation mark behind each window), which is all you can ask for really.- For the ultimate binary advent calendar, check isitchristmas.com every day in December. It’s either Christmas or it isn’t.
- have contributed to the field of science
- be real – so no fictional characters please
- not be alive – Her Majesty the Queen is the only exception
- have shaped thought, innovation, leadership or values in the UK
- inspire people, not divide them
Aperiodvent Day 2: Sprouts
Did you know there’s a mathematical game called Sprouts? It’s a game played by drawing dots and lines on paper, and while it seems simple, there’s actually some interesting maths – graph theory and game theory – behind it. According to Wikipedia:
The game is played by two players, starting with a few spots drawn on a sheet of paper. Players take turns, where each turn consists of drawing a line between two spots (or from a spot to itself) and adding a new spot somewhere along the line. The players are constrained by the following rules.
[…] The player who makes the last move wins.
There’s a variant of the game called Brussels Sprouts, which involves drawing a cross instead of a dot somewhere on the line, creating two endpoints, and lines must join two endpoints – but this game is mathematically less interesting (the number of crosses initially entirely determines who will win).
For those who take Christmas super seriously, this paper by Ricardo Focadi and Flaminia Luccio outlines the history of the game, some ways to analyse it using graph theory, and winning strategies.
This post is part of the Aperiodical’s 2018 Aperiodvent Calendar.
Aperiodvent Day 1: Other Mathematical Advent Calendars
In what can only be described as a poor marketing move, here are some recommendations for other mathsy advent calendars around the internet.
This post is part of the Aperiodical’s 2018 Aperiodvent Calendar.
Aperiodvent 2018 – a month of mathematical things
We’re planning to reprise our some-but-not-every-yearly advent calendar of mathematical curiosities, starting here on 1st December and proceeding very advent-calendar-like daily thereafter. You’ll see posts appear in our site feed and on Twitter, and we’ll keep this post updated with links to each day’s post. Credit to Number Gossip for the numbery facts.
The only triangular cube
The only even prime
The only prime followed by a square
The smallest number of colours sufficient to colour any planar map
The number of Platonic solids
The smallest perfect number
The only prime followed by a cube
The only composite cube in the Fibonacci sequence
The smallest odd composite number
The base of our number system
The only prime comprising an even number of identical digits
The smallest abundant number
The smallest emirp
The smallest positive integer n such that n and $2^n$ end with the same digit
The smallest emirpimes
The number of vertices of a tesseract
The number of syllables in a haiku
The only number that is twice the sum of its digits
The largest prime which is a palindrome in Roman numerals
The maximum number of moves needed to solve the Rubik’s cube
The number of spots on a standard cubical die
The only fixed point of the Look and Say operation
The smallest isolated prime (not a Twin prime)
The only number that is the product of all the numbers less than its square root
We wish you all a brilliant festive season!
Here are the mathematicians you nominated to go on the new £50 note
The Bank of England has released a preliminary list of names nominated by the public to appear on the new £50 note. I’ve done a bit of analysis on the list, and present here my findings.
To recap: the Bank asked for nominations satisfying the following conditions:
The released list consists of the names that were nominated in the first week, and belong to people who are real, deceased, and contributed to science ‘in any way’. They haven’t divulged the number of times each name was nominated, or the ineligible names.
Rachel Riley admits she can’t do maths (but not really)
Eagle-eyed Riley-botherers on Twitter may have noticed this video Rachel tweeted on Saturday:
https://twitter.com/RachelRileyRR/status/1066407882839769090
Zeckendorf cup arithmetic
My 5-minute talk at the big MathsJam conference this weekend was about some stacking cups that my daughter is too young to appreciate. Here’s the really quick version, in just over a minute:
I gave the answer at MathsJam, but the title of this post contains a big hint that should get you there with a bit of googling.