Watch geometer/topologist Caleb Ashley explain the parallel postulate on Numberphile.
“Pariah Moonshine” Part I: The Happy Family and the Pariah Groups
Being a mathematician, I often get asked if I’m good at calculating tips. I’m not. In fact, mathematicians study lots of other things besides numbers. As most people know, if they stop to think about it, one of the other things mathematicians study is shapes. Some of us are especially interested in the symmetries of…
Footballs on road signs: an international overview
I’m an old fashioned manager, I write the team down on the back of a fag packet and I play a simple 4-4-2. Mike Bassett, England Manager I’m very much like Mike Bassett: I like standing on the terraces, I like full-backs whose main skill is kicking wingers into the ad hoardings, and – most…
@standupmaths’ petition has had a response from the government
Friend of the site Matt Parker recently made headlines because of his UK Government Petition to correct the heinous geometrical oddity that is the UK Tourist sign for a football ground. In the standard sign, somehow a sheet of tessellating hexagons is depicted as wrapping around a sphere in a highly improbable (and provably impossible) way.…
Stirling’s numbers in a nutshell
This is a guest post by researcher Audace Dossou-Olory of Stellenbosch University, South Africa. In assignment problems, one wants to find an optimal and efficient way to assign objects of a given set to objects of another given set. An assignment can be regarded as a bijective map $\pi$ between two finite sets $E$ and $F$ of…
A new aspect of mathematics
This is a guest post written by David Nkansah, a mathematics student at the University of Glasgow. Around the fourth century BC, the term ‘Mathematics’ was defined by Aristotle as the “science of quantity”. It’s my own experience as a young mathematician to say this definition, although correct in its own right, poses a problem…
Carnival of Mathematics 150
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of September, and compiled by Alexander, is now online at Codima. 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.