A few days ago, friend of The Aperiodical James Grime contacted me asking if I would be able to review The Theory of Everything. Obviously I was flattered. In a past life I did some mathematics/physics in the same ballpark as Hawking’s celebrated black-hole work so guessed James was asking because he knew I used to know something about this. Or perhaps it was because he knew that Hawking ran over my foot in a bar at the 17th International General Relativity and Gravitation conference in Dublin back in 2004? Either way, James had given me a pass to go and watch the beautiful Eddie Redmayne for the evening!
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Mathematician wins ‘Oscar’
This year’s Oscars ceremony, which will take place on 22nd February, will honour those who’ve achieved greatness in film-making, performance, scoring, sound and production. You may not know that in addition to the main ceremony, the Academy also has an untelevised award ceremony taking place two weeks earlier, called the Academy Scientific and Technical Awards (nerd Oscars).
These awards recognise achievement in the field of scientific and technological advancements related to film-making, and have in the past been awarded to a variety of different advancements, including Dolby Surround Sound, the Xenon Arc lamp, IMAX and even Jim Henson’s animatronic muppet technology.
This year though, finally seeing sense, the Academy’s Technical Achievement award goes to a mathematician. Robert Bridson, who’s worked on CGI-heavy films including Gravity, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and The Adventures of Tin Tin, has been recognised for his work on “early conceptualization of sparse-tiled voxel data structures and their application to modelling and simulation.”
Sierpiński Carpet Project
Project organisers José and David
If you enjoyed the magnificent ridiculousness of Matt Parker’s MegaMenger international fractal building project, but would prefer something slightly lower-dimensional, we’ve found the collaborative international fractal-building project for you!
A team led by José L. Rodríguez at the University of Almería, in Spain (who also built a Menger Sponge for MegaMenger) are attempting to build a giant Sierpiński carpet, using green and purple stickers, and an army of unwitting excited school children.
Watch the LMS become very old, LIVE
We haven’t properly mentioned until now that The London Mathematical Society is 150 years old this year. You can’t gather a whole society of mathematicians together without one or two of them noticing that 150 is a nice round number, and some form of celebration is in order.
The Aperiodical’s Best Maths Pun of 2014 Competition – The Results
It’s time to reveal the results of our search for the best maths pun of 2014.
First of all, a startling number of you seemed unclear as to what a pun is. Yet others seemed not to notice that we were asking for new puns, so we had to rule those out as well. After ruling out all the invalid entries, we were still left with a few dozen workable puns, so there was plenty to consider.
Below are the results, along with comments from our awards committee (Peter, Katie, Paul and Christian, along with guest celebri-judges Matt Parker, Steve Mould and James Grime, who happened to be nearby at the time).
Congratulations to everyone who gets a mention, and of course to our absolute favourite, the winner. Which will be revealed at the end, after you’ve read all the not-quite-as-good ones, obviously.
Particularly mathematical New Years Honours 2015
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:
Ivor Grattan-Guinness 1941-2014
An obituary has been published in The Guardian for Ivor Grattan-Guinness, historian of mathematics and logic, who died of heart failure on 12th December 2014. This begins by explaining that when Ivor became interested in the history of mathematics in the 1960s,
it was an area of study widely considered to be irrelevant to mathematics proper, or something that older mathematicians did on retirement. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he found that mathematics was presented drily, with no inkling of the original motivations behind its development. So Ivor set himself the task of asking “What happened in the past?” — as opposed, he said, to taking the heritage viewpoint of asking “How did we get here?”
Read more: Ivor Grattan-Guinness obituary (The Guardian).