Ten! TEN! TEN! Incredible. David Cushing asked me a very good question once: what have you done between five and ten times (inclusive)? Well, this is the last time ‘Writing an Aperiodical Round Up’ will be in the same category as ‘getting a new wallet’ and ‘saying hello to Peter Beardsley’.
Hello, my name’s Christian Perfect and, more often than an unbiased observer would expect, I find odd maths things on the internet.
Today’s Google doodle (for those not in the know, the Google homepage alters its header based on the date, and on dates of special nerdy significance, they theme them around relevant birthdays/anniversaries) is about Maria Gaetana Agnesi, a female mathematician. Agnesi was born on 16th May 1718, making today her 296th birthday. This means you have four years to prepare for her 300th birthday bash, which I hear is going to go off big style.
Primo, a board game which puts the ‘fun’ in the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, has now been successfully funded via Kickstarter. In a recent blog post, the creators Katherine Cook and Daniel Finkel boast:
The game plays beautifully in play test after play test. It’s one of the most mathematically rich games we have ever seen, and at the same time avoids that icky “educational game” feel. Primo is a real game and it’s worth playing because it’s fun. Really fun.
The Homotopy Type Theory book was an ambitious attempt to relay the foundations of maths on a combination of type theory and topology. It also makes heavy use of computer proof-checking, which might be why the US Department of Defense is interested in it: they’ve just given Carnegie Mellon University’s Steve Awodey $7.5 million to continue the project.
Here’s a snippet from the press release announcing the grant:
The MURI [Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative] award, officially entitled “Homotopy Type Theory: Unified Foundations of Mathematics and Computation,” is through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. It will establish CMU as the international center of research in this new field, which uses a fusion of tools drawn from abstract mathematics, such as homotopy and category theory, and the powerful computational paradigms of type theory and program verification. The resulting new, computational foundation for mathematics is not only an important theoretical advance. It also promises to provide a useful practical tool for mathematicians and other scientists in the form of powerful computer systems that can automatically verify the correctness of large and complex mathematical proofs and organize and unify a large body of verified mathematical theory in a form that can be reused for other scientific purposes. Equally important is the promise of new applications in theoretical computer science through the use of abstract geometrical intuitions and methods.
The American Mathematical Society has published its first book for children. It’s called Really Big Numbers.
They’ve made a rather pleasant trailer for it.
[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEOY9UAsCFM]
It made me want to wait for the audiobook version: author Richard Evan Schwartz has a soothing Bob Ross-like voice. (Edit: turns out the voice is Alexander Dupuis)
Really Big Numbers will be available from the AMS from the 12th of May, priced $25.
Imagine, if you will, a group of people who enjoy recreational mathematics and consequently decide that there should be more places for them to share fun maths. It’s crazy and unprecedented, I know, but humour me.
Recreational Mathematics Magazine does what it says on the tin. It’s a semiannual electronic journal published by the Ludus Association addressing “games and puzzles, problems, mathmagic, mathematics and arts, history of mathematics, math and fun with algorithms, reviews and news.”
Invented in 1974, patented in 1975 and released for sale in Hungary in 1977, Rubik’s Cube could certainly be considered to have reached its 40th birthday this year. To celebrate, inventor Ernő Rubik has helped put together a special exhibition at Liberty Science Centre, New Jersey, celebrating the history of the hexahedral enigma. The exhibition, called ‘Beyond Rubik’s Cube’, opens on 26th April for several months.