The London Mathematical Society Popular Lectures present exciting topics in mathematics and its applications to a wide audience. The 2017 Popular Lectures were Adventures in the 7th Dimension (Dr Jason Lotay, University College London) and The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Physics in Maths (Professor David Tong, University of Cambridge).
The Lectures are now available on the LMS’s YouTube channel, along with many of the previous years’ videos.
Aperiodipal and number ninja, Stand-up Mathematician Matt Parker, has set up a petition on the UK parliament petitions website to change the awful, awful tourist board official symbol for a football ground (US readers: imagine I’m saying ‘soccer stadium’). In Matt’s words: The football shown on UK street signs (for football grounds) is made entirely…
Quanta Magazine reports progress on what its headline calls the “Infinite Pool-Table Problem”. The problem is explained in the article as follows:
Strike a billiard ball on a frictionless table with no pockets so that it never stops bouncing off the table walls. If you returned years later, what would you find? Would the ball have settled into some repeating orbit, like a planet circling the sun, or would it be continually tracing new paths in a ceaseless exploration of its felt-covered plane?
The article describes progress on the problem via study of ‘optimal’ billiard tables, “shapes whose particular angles make it possible to understand every billiard path that could occur within them”.
New Shapes Solve Infinite Pool-Table Problem, Quanta Magazine.
via @ColintheMathmo on Twitter.
Paul and I have spent this week blogging from the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, an international event for PhD/postdoc students and top-level maths and computer science researchers. It was a long week of extravagant dinners, incredible talks and press conferences, (maths) celeb spotting, branded conference freebies, hilarious quotes and exceptional hospitality. Oh, and blogging. Here’s a…
The Open University and UK Mathematics Trust have teamed up to launch Perplex, a mobile app containing mathematical puzzles and games. It’s available for iPhone and Android, and can also be played directly on their website.
Here’s a nice thing: in memory of Maryam Mirzakhani, Amir Asghari has set up Mathematics 4 Maryams, a site with the aim of inspiring and motivating future Maryams by linking them with “maths mates”. Tim Gowers says it’s a website in memory of Maryam Mirzahkani. I don’t mean that it is a memorial website: rather,…
A little bit of news for those who, through necessity or ignorance or unique personal whimsy, use a WYSIWYG editor for putting equations into computers.
WIRIS, whose technology is used in things like the virtual learning environment Blackboard, have bought Design Science, makers of MathType. MathType became the de facto standard equation editor for Microsoft Word back before its built-in solution was any good, but has somewhat stagnated recently. The press release says, “by combining our teams we will now be able to offer education, scientific and publishing communities newer products at a fast pace”. I think that’s a long way of saying they’re not going to duplicate their efforts any more.
More information: Press Release from Design Science.
via Emma Cliffe on Twitter.