MathJax, the web library that provides LaTeX-quality mathematical typesetting, has received a a new set of tools to improve accessibility of mathematical notation. The new MathJax Accessibility Extensions add on-the-fly speech rendering of notation, and a tool to explore expressions through intelligent collapsing and expanding of sub-expressions.
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- Prof. Alice Rogers, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, King’s College, London, appointed OBE for services to Mathematics Education and Higher Education.
- John Sidwell, volunteer, HMP Hewell appointed MBE for services to Prisoners through One to One Maths.
- Danielle George, vice-dean for teaching and learning, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Manchester, appointed MBE for services to engineering through public engagement.
- Anthony Finkelstein, professor of software systems engineering, University College London and the Alan Turing Institute, for services to computer science and engineering.
- Economist Angus Deaton, professor, Princeton University, Nobel laureate, for services to research in economics and international affairs.
- Prof. Alan Thorpe, lately Director-General of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts, appointed OBE for services to environmental science and research (thanks to Philip Browne on Twitter).
- Prof. Nalini Joshi was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO); the citation is more involved than the UK ones and reads “for distinguished service to mathematical science and tertiary education as an academic, author and researcher, to professional societies, and as a role model and mentor of young mathematicians” (added in an update 16/06/16).
Particularly mathematical Birthday Honours 2016
With the announcement the Queen’s Birthday Honours list, it’s time for the latest in our ongoing Honours-watch series of posts. In this, we search arbitrarily for ‘mathematics’ in the PDFs of the various lists, and hope our well-informed readers fill in the blanks where actual knowledge is required.
It’s also worth mentioning the new batch of Regius professorships, 12 posts created at universities around the UK to celebrate the Queen’s 90th birthday: Oxford University has been given a professorship in maths, but no appointment has been made yet.
Are there any others we’ve missed? Please add any of interest in the comments below. A full list may be obtained from the Cabinet Office website.
Just how big is a big proof?
With news that a recent proof of the Boolean Pythagorean Triples Theorem is the ‘largest proof ever’, we collect and run-down some of the biggest, baddest, proofiest chunks of monster maths.
CLP reads “Non-sexist solution to the ménage problem”
I rediscovered this nice paper by Kenneth P. Bogart in my Interesting Esoterica collection, and decided to read through it. It turned out that, while the solution presented is very neat, there’s quite a bit of hard work to do to along the way. I’m not particularly experienced with combinatorics, so the little facts that the paper skips over took me quite a while to verify.
Once I was happy with the proof, I decided to record a video explaining how it works. Here it is:
I probably made mistakes. If you spot one, please write a polite correction in the comments.
Maths and stats on Radio 1!
(For once I can use an exclamation mark next to a number without wise alecks making the canonical joke)
Maths and stats! On BBC Radio 1! Who’d’ve though it!
DJ Clara Amfo and the ubiquitous Hannah Fry have got a new series on the UK’s top pop station, looking at music from a mathematical perspective.
Music by Numbers (excuse me, Music by Num83r5), is currently being broadcast at 9pm each Tuesday, and there are a couple of episodes already on iPlayer Radio to catch up on. The first is about Coldplay (records sold: millions; distinct tunes composed: 1) and the second looks at a few numbers to do with Iggy Azalea’s career.
It’s mostly a very easy listen, more a biography hung off a list of numbers than any real maths, but that might be your cup of tea. And Dr Fry’s segments do go into a little bit of depth about subjects like how the top 40 chart is calculated.
I’ll warn you now that each episode is an hour long, with a lot of music breaks. If you’re like me, your tolerance for some of the featured artists might not be sufficient to get through a whole episode in one go.
Listen: Music by Numbers on BBC Radio 1.
Not mentioned on The Aperiodical this month, May 2016
Here are a few of the stories that we didn’t get round to covering in depth this month.
Turing’s Sunflowers Project – results
Manchester Science Festival’s mass-participation maths/gardening project, Turing’s Sunflowers, ran in 2012 and invited members of the public to grow their own sunflowers, and then photograph or bring in the seed heads so a group of mathematicians could study them. The aim was to determine whether Fibonacci numbers occur in the seed spirals – this has previously been observed, but no large-scale study like this has ever been undertaken. This carries on the work Alan Turing did before he died.
The results of the research are now published – a paper has been published in the Royal Society’s Open Science journal, and the findings indicate that while Fibonacci numbers do often occur, other types of numbers also crop up, including Lucas numbers and other similarly defined number sequences.
Solomon Golomb (1932-2016)
“I’m proud that I’ve lived to see… so many of the things that I’ve worked on being so widely adopted that no one even thinks about where they came from.” ((Solomon W. Golomb – 2016 Laureate of the Franklin Institute in Electrical Engineering)) Solomon Golomb (1932-2016)
Solomon Golomb, who died on Sunday May 1st, was a man who revelled in the key objects in a recreational mathematician’s toolbox: number sequences, shapes and words (in many languages). He also carved out a distinguished career by, broadly speaking, transferring his detailed knowledge of the mathematics behind integer sequences to engineering problems in the nascent field of digital communications, and his discoveries are very much still in use today.