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.
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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.
Vi Hart has 3D printed a hypercube made of monkeys that has the symmetries of the Quaternion group
Group theorists, often interested principally in the abstract, have been known to neglect the vital importance of producing funky gizmos that exhibit the symmetries they have theorized about. Internet maths celeb Vi Hart, working with mathematician Henry Segerman, has addressed this absence in the case of $Q_8$, the quaternion group. The object they’ve designed is four-dimensional and made of monkeys, and they’ve done the closest thing possible to making one, which is to 3D-print an embedding of it into our three-dimensional universe, also made of monkeys. Their ArXiv preprint (pdf) is well worth a read, and when you get to the photos of the resulting sculpture (entitled “More fun than a hypercube of monkeys”), you’ll fall off your chair.
Further reading
The Quaternion Group as a Symmetry Group by Vi Hart and Henry Segerman, on the ArXiv.
Nothing Is More Fun than a Hypercube of Monkeys at Roots of Unity, including an animated gif of a virtual version of the sculpture rotating through 4D-space.