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…
Carnival of Mathematics 157
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of April, and compiled by Becky, is now online at Lines, Curves, Spirals. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.
How to join in with our distributed Wiki edit day
You may have seen our post last month about our remote Wiki Editing Day, this coming Saturday 12th May. We’re hoping to get a bunch of people in different locations editing pages on Wikiquote and other Wikimedia sites, to improve the visibility of female mathematicians. Here’s how you can get involved.
I’ve written some stuff for the HLF Spektrum blog
Since blogging for the Heidelberg Laureate Forum last September, I’ve now started writing regular posts for their all-year-round blog, which is hosted at Spektrum SciLogs. My first two posts are: a writeup of Robert Langlands’ work that won him this year’s Abel prize a post expanding on the recent chromatic number result by Aubrey de…
The incredible palindromic hat-trick
I’ve made another one of my interactive online maths doodads. You should have a go at it right now. It doesn’t require any effort on your part, other than coming up with a positive integer.
The chromatic number of the plane is at least 5
A long-standing mathematical problem has had a recent breakthrough – scientist Aubrey de Grey has proved that the chromatic number of the plane is at least 5.
Review – A Mind At Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman
For a while now I’ve been fascinated by the story of Claude Shannon, the pioneer of information theory and the originator of many fundamental concepts now used in all modern manipulation and transmission of data. Being sent a copy of this biography to review was a great chance to find out more about his work…