Maths – as teachers are fond of telling anyone who’ll listen – is everywhere. In this difficult second episode of the difficult second series of Relatively Prime, Samuel Hansen shows us a few important places where it can be a help: at the petrol pump, at the birthday party, in the car park and at the bar — or rather, in deciding whether to go.
From the team that brought you the Alan Turing Cryptography competition, Manchester Uni’s maths department are running another schools maths puzzle competition, this time called MathsBombe.
Aimed at students up to Year 13 (England and Wales), S6 (Scotland), Year 14 (Northern Ireland), the competition starts on 13th January, and teams of up to 4 can register.
The puzzles will be released every two weeks, in four sets, and there’s a prize for the team solving each puzzle set first. There are plenty of other prizes too, and it’s free to enter. There’s still time!
More information: MathsBombe website.
I’ve been waiting for the new season of Relatively Prime for more than three years. I’ve listened to Chinook, the highlight of Season 1, countless times since then. And finally, finally, it’s arrived in my podcast feed.
Woo, and for that matter, hoo!
Once again, it’s time for our traditional trawl through the New Years Honours list for mentions of “mathematics”, hoping that better-informed readers will fill in the people this crude method has missed. I’ve found the following names:
Are there any others I’ve missed? Please add any of interest in the comments below. A full list may be obtained from the Cabinet Office website.
Reader Marc Chamberlain sent this video in a bit too late to get in our advent calendar, but it’s about the 12 days of Christmas so we’re still cool, right?
Looking for something to do with your Christmas tree, when it gets to twelfth night? Here’s an idea: cut it into a beautiful platonic solid. Follow these step-by-step instructions from Dan Beyer.
This the last entry in the Aperiodical Advent Calendar. We hope you’ve enjoyed it, and we wish you and yours a wonderful holiday season. See you in the new year!
Today’s entry is a Theorem of the Day:
The Robin-Lagarias Theorem:
Let $H_n$ denote the n-th harmonic number $\sum_{i=1}^n \frac{1}{i}$ , and let $\sigma(n)$ denote the divisor function $\sum_{d \vert n} d$. Then the Riemann Hypothesis is equivalent to the statement that, for $n \geq 1$, $\sigma(n) \leq H_n + \ln(H_n) e^{H_n}$ .
While this isn’t the traditional Christmas kind of Robin, it is equivalent to the Riemann Hypothesis. For more information, see the full listing at Theorem of the Day: the Robin-Lagarias Theorem.
This is part of the Aperiodical Advent Calendar. We’ll be posting a new surprise for you each morning until Christmas!