Stand-up mathematician Matt Parker has accepted our π approximation challenge. His method involves weighing a large cardboard circle.
So, how did that go? Fortunately, Matt got it all on video:
I think he deserves a round of applause for doing all that long division.
Birth of a Theorem, the autobiographical book by French mathematician and (spoiler) Fields Medallist Cédric Villani, is Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 this week, read by non-French non-mathematician Julian Rhind-Tutt. Villani also appeared on discussion show Start the Week on Monday, talking about ‘the mathematical mind’ along with mathematician Vicky Neale; Morgan Matthews, director of kid-does-maths film X+Y; and novelist Zia Haider Rahman.
As part of our massive π day celebrations, The Aperiodical has challenged me with the task of assembling a group of mathematicians, some bits of cardboard and string, and a video camera, and attempting to determine the exact value of π, for your entertainment.
The challenge, which was to be completed without a calculator, involved using known mathematical formulae for π and its occurrence in the equations of certain physical systems. In the video below, seven different methods are used – some more effective than others…
If you reckon you too can ineptly compute a value in the region of π (in particular, if you can get a more accurate approximation than the date of π day itself, which gives 3.1415), feel free to join in the challenge and see how close you get.
Happy birthday AND many happy returns to George Boole, 200 this year!
The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, has helped launch University College Cork’s year of festivities celebrating Boole, their first professor of maths and the inventor of Boolean algebra.
The year’s activities will include the restoration of Boole’s first home in Cork, an official film biography, an art exhibition of “contermporary art and mathematical data”, three conferences in maths and computer science, and of course a youth outreach programme. All the relevant information is available at a swishy new site set up for the purpose, georgeboole.com.
I’ve heard the year will end with a celebratory curry – and plenty of NAND bread to go around! Geddit?! (groan – Ed.)
An Taoiseach launches George Boole celebrations – press release from University College Cork
Via Irish Maths Archive on Twitter
As mentioned previously, the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences is 50 this year. To celebrate that fact, and to encourage readers to concentrate on filling in the gaps in the missing entries instead of just adding new ones, there’s a \$1,000 prize for the best solution to an open problem posed in an OEIS entry.
The announcement by OEIS creator Neil Sloane seems only to have been published as a PDF, so I’m reproducing it here for everyone’s convenience:
. @christianp has turned into a one-man plug for the holes in Wolfram Alpha. I’m genuinely impressed.
— Colin Beveridge (@icecolbeveridge) February 28, 2015
For a while, I’ve been following this cool Twitter account that tweets questions Wolfram|Alpha can’t answer. The genius of it is that the questions all look like things that you could half-imagine the solution algorithm for at a glance, and many of them look like the kinds of questions Wolfram like to give as examples when they’re showing off how clever their system is.
Questions like this:
number of words between "landslide" and "Beelzebub" in Bohemian Rhapsody
— Wolfram|Alpha Can't (@wacnt) January 22, 2015
The answer to that is 278. How do I know that? I know that because I went on a little problem-solving binge answering the questions that Wolfram|Alpha can’t.
Card game fans might be familiar with the game of Dobble, in which a set of cards featuring symbols is laid out on the table, and family members tear each other’s hands off/eyes out in order to find the one symbol a given pair of cards has in common. Well, it’s now also available virtually!