Here’s a roundup of some things that happened in September 2023 that you may have missed.
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MathsCity Leeds starting adults-only evening events
The hands-on maths discovery centre MathsCity in Leeds is branching out into adults-only evening events! This is in addition to their current programme of drop-in activities and family events, which already includes plenty of half-term and summer holiday activities for kids and families.
$-e^{i\pi}$ to Watch: 3Blue1Brown
In this series of posts, we’ll be featuring mathematical video and streaming channels from all over the internet, by speaking to the creators of the channel and asking them about what they do.
We spoke to Grant Sanderson, author of the 3Blue1Brown channel, which now has over 5 million subscribers and has been posting videos since about 2016.
Podcasting About: Maths + Cancer
In this series of posts, we’ll be featuring mathematical podcasts from all over the internet, by speaking to the creators of the podcast and asking them about what they do. For this special edition, we’re featuring the Maths + Cancer podcasdt, which was hosted by the late Vicky Neale.
We spoke to Dyrol Lumbard, from the University of Oxford’s Mathematical Institute.
Mathematical Objects: Mathematics in Theory and Practice, edited by Warwick Sawyer
A conversation about mathematics inspired by an old textbook, Mathematics in Theory and Practice, edited by Warwick Sawyer. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett.
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Aperiodical News Roundup – August 2023
Here’s a selection of mathematical stories that crossed our desk in August.
Maths Research News
Researchers have discovered that a shape can be designed to trace almost any infinite periodic trajectory when rolling down a slope, as seen in this Nature.com video (via Jeroen van Dorp)
A new diamond open access journal, Innovations in Graph Theory, has been founded. The first issue of the journal is expected to appear in 2024. (via Peter Cameron)
And in important publication news for silly season: Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine have achieved “the true ideal of an unordered set of equal authors, where every author comes first”. Their paper Every Author as First Author proposes a new standard for writing author names on papers and in bibliographies, which places every author as a first author, with the names all superimposed on top of each other, including details of the \namestack LaTeX command for this purpose. The results are predictably hilarious (see below). (via Nalini Joshi)
![Screenshot from paper: "being equal. In our own writing, we try to avoid this practice, and instead write all authors' surnames whenever citing a paper, e.g., "X, Y, and Z [#]". But this workaround becomes impractical for references with over a dozen authors, such as some of our papers (*incomprehensible black smear of overlaid names* 2020; *incomprehensible black smear* 2020) or some papers in astronomy (*incomprehensible black smear* 2006) and biology (*incomprehensible black smear* 2001)."](https://aperiodical.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/image-9.png)
Other News
Alison Kiddle has been posting daily conversation prompts involving LEGO to stimulate mathematical thinking on their blog every day in August, and people have been responding on Twitter and Mastodon.
Mathematician and logician Peter Aczel has died, as has Ian G. Macdonald (who introduced Macdonald polynomials).
Podcasting about: Digging For The Why podcast
In this series of posts, we’ll be featuring mathematical podcasts from all over the internet, by speaking to the creators of the podcast and asking them about what they do.
We spoke to Andy Lumley, Head of Learning Technology for educational charity MEI, about their podcast Digging For The Why.