The year in proofs has started with a big result in combinatorics: the existence conjecture for designs. As usual, weightier minds than ours have comprehensively explained the result, so I’ll just give a brief summary of the problem and then some links.
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All Squared, Number 11 – Maths Jam
MathsJam is an annual conference in the UK, and a monthly night in pubs around the world, organised respectively by mathematician and juggler Colin Wright, and stand-up mathematician Matt Parker. We cornered Matt and Colin at the MathsJam conference last November, and talked to them for just over half an hour about the conference, the pub nights, and a disturbing amount about cake.
Here are some links to the things we talked about:
MathsJam website
MathsJam conference website
@MathsJam, on Twitter
MathsJam Bake-off entries, 2013
Matt’s maths mug
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Carnival of Mathematics #106 – December 2013
Happy New Year! And welcome to the first Carnival of Mathematics of 2014. The Carnival is a monthly roundup of blog posts on or related to mathematics, from all over the internet. Posts are submitted by authors and readers, and collated by the host, whose blog it’s posted on. This month, the Carnival has pulled in here at The Aperiodical, and we’re all ready with our party hats for the celebration of mathematical blogging that implies.
Tydlig, a nice calculator for iOS
[youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbXaKxxUomE]
Closer to a computer algebra system than a traditional calculator, this new app for iOS (iPhone and iPad) allows you to make calculations and create graphs, and mess around with the values to see what that does to the output. It looks like this is achieved without using any (explicit) symbolics, which results in a neat and pretty interface, made even nicer by the fact that you can move calculations around the screen and arrange them as you want. The name, Tydlig, is the Swedish word for ‘clear’.
If anyone’s willing to download a copy ((TYDLIG is also the name of an induction hob sold by IKEA, and if anyone wants to buy and review that too, you’re welcome to, but not for this site.)) ($4.99 on the App Store) and try it out, we’d be interested to hear how easy it is to use, and what other nice tricks it’s got up its sleeve. Use the ‘Send something in’ link above to get in touch, or leave a comment below.
More information
Tydlig on Twitter.
By Napier’s bones! A new exhibition celebrating the inventor of logarithms
Put away your calculators – the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh has announced that it will host an exhibition all about John Napier to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of his treatise on logarithms, Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio.
Napier’s pioneering work on logarithms offered simple and elegant solutions to previously laborious and error-prone calculations; enabling more calculations to be completed in an hour than had previously been completed in one day. From the introduction of the decimal point to the development of slide rules and ‘Napier’s rods’, this exhibition will explore how Napier’s revolutionary innovations advanced and influenced mathematics from the 17th Century to the modern day.
Power of Ten will run from 28 March to 6 July, and entry is free.
More information
National Museums Scotland Exhibitions for 2014
John Napier to tax modern minds 400 years on, in The Scotsman
A translation of Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio by Ian Bruce
Event page at Edinburgh Napier University
via GHS Mathematics Department on Twitter
OEIS contest for January AMS/MAA meeting
Top chap (and newest Aperiodipal?) Neil Sloane, founder of the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, wrote in to direct our attention towards a “best new integer sequence” contest being run on the sequence-fans mailing list.
Any sequence submitted between the middle of December and the middle of January is eligible. The winners (of which there will be at least three) will each receive a signed copy of the original 1973 Handbook of Integer Sequences, as well as the highly coveted “nice” keyword on their encyclopedia entries.
Particularly mathematical New Years Honours 2014
With the announcement of honours for 1,195 people in the 2014 New Years 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.