The Calculus Story is the latest new book from author and mathematician David Acheson, telling the story of the history of calculus – with all the positive determinants and negative determinants along the way. The book came out on 23rd November through Oxford University Press. We spoke to David to find out what inspired him…
The University of Manchester’s annual Alan Turing Cryptography Competition and MathsBombe Competition are now open for registration. Now in its seventh year, the Alan Turing Cryptography Competition is for year 11 and below in England and Wales, S4 in Scotland and Year 12 in N. Ireland. There’s also a competition for older students – MathsBombe is open to year 13 and below in England and Wales, S6 in Scotland and Year 14 in N. Ireland.
Every one to two weeks a new chapter of the six-chapter story is released, and each chapter has a new cryptographic puzzle to solve. Teams consisting of up to four people can win prizes for being the first to solve each puzzle, and also for being randomly picked from all correct entries for each puzzle.
The Alan Turing Cryptography Competition begins on Monday 15th January 2018, with MathsBombe starting on Wednesday 10th January 2018. For more information and to enter, visit the Cryptography Competition website or MathsBombe website.
The day after last week’s budget, I logged onto the BBC News website and clicked on their budget calculator to find out if I was a winner or a loser. The questions are pretty simple: first off, it asks how much you drink, smoke and drive, and then it asks how much you earn, plus…
The new live DVD from science comedy trio Festival of the Spoken Nerd, Just for Graphs, is out now, and we’ve been sent a copy to review. We got together a pile of appropriately nerdy science fans to watch (left), and here’s what we thought.
This post is part of a series of posts by guest author Joshua Holden. I ended Part I with the observation that the Monster group was connected with the symmetries of a group sitting in 196883-dimensional space, whereas the number 196884 appeared as part of a function used in number theory, the study of the…
A couple of weekends ago was the big MathsJam gathering (I might call it a recreational maths conference, but this is discouraged). Two of the delightful sideshows, alongside an excellent series of talks, were the competitions. The Baking Competition is fairly straightforward, with prizes for “best flavour, best presentation, and best maths”: The first will…
Here’s a round-up of a few news stories we’ve not had chance to write about this month.