Has there been any progress on verifying the proof of the abc conjecture or the solution to the Navier-Stokes equations? It’s been eerily quiet. I’m never going to come close to understanding any of those things, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting news that they’ve been either accepted or rejected.
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Book review: Jordan Ellenberg’s How Not To Be Wrong
Jordan Ellenberg is an algebraic geometer at the University of Wisconsin and a blogger at Slate. His book How Not To Be Wrong was new when he sent The Aperiodical a copy to review ages ago.
Particularly mathematical Birthday Honours 2014
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.
IMA 50th Anniversary events
The IMA turns 50 this year, and is holding two celebration events and publishing a book.
CP and Cushing take the National Numeracy Challenge
Cushing was injured in a serious maths accident recently (he fell out of the bath) so I wanted to assess the damage to his number-wrangling faculties.
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Fortunately, there’s the National Numeracy Challenge, which begins with a test to pinpoint your weak areas. National Numeracy is a charity that wants every adult in the UK to “reach a level of numeracy skills that allow them to meet their full potential.” Well, if there’s one thing we’ve got, it’s bags of potential.
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Mathematical soap bubbles by Juan Bragado
I recently tried to blow some clever soap bubbles to demonstrate some maths concepts to some students. It went terribly. Juan Bragado is much better at blowing mathematical bubbles, so he’s made this gentle video showing all sorts of soapy polyhedra, and other mathematical shapes made from bubbles.
[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEXj69hCi44]
via John Golden on Twitter
Oh, Stephen
“It is hugely complicated. In fact, compared to football I think Quantum Physics is relatively straightforward.”
– Professor Stephen Hawking
Even you, Stephen?
If you pick up basically any newspaper in Ireland or the UK today, you’ll probably find a story about Professor Stephen Hawking’s “formula for World Cup success”. At first glance, it doesn’t look good: The World’s Most Famous Scientist appears finally to have succumbed to the temptation of nonsense formula publicity.