This Summer, I’m trying something new: I’ve enlisted a few of my favourite mathematicians to take part in a tournament we’re calling The Summer’s full of instant knock-out tournaments to identify the people at the apex of all sorts of avenues of achievement. I thought, I’ve got a load of fun maths friends, who always…
Number Drop is a mobile app maths game we came across recently, and have taken the opportunity to have a chat with its creator, Ben. NumberDrop is available for on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
Do you remember Paul the Octopus? During the 2010 World Cup, in what his Wikipedia page calls “divinations”, Paul was offered boxes of food labelled with different competitors. Whichever box he ate from first was considered his prediction for the match, with some success. Yesterday morning, my son and I did something similar with our…
If you like pretty visualisations and statistics, we’ve found the website for you. Seeing Theory has been put together by a group of undergraduate students at Brown University in the USA, and aims to make statistics more accessible through interactive JavaScript visualisations. Starting from simple coin and dice examples, it builds up to Bayesian inference…
Ten days ago we posted a cryptogram puzzle, set by mathematician and author Josh Holden. We’ve had a number of entries, some which were so enthusiastic they ignored that we’d said to email them in and tried to post in the comments. However, from the correctly submitted entries, we had one stand-out winner – a…
This is the 158th Carnival of Mathematics, a monthly round-up of interesting maths bits from across the internet. Convention dictates that I now therefore specify some interesting facts about the number 158. Unfortunately I am writing this on a train with no internet access, which will make fulfilling this obligation more than usually challenging.
Author and mathematician Josh Holden has come up with a nice puzzle — so we’re posting it as a competition. If you think you can decrypt the message below, send in the decrypted message and a one- or two-sentence description of the mathematical principle behind the encryption key to root@aperiodical.com. The first correct entry received…