I’ve been at it again, making videos for that YouTube – this time, a collabo with James Grime. We have each posted a video on the topic of a mathematical game, as we both had things we wanted to make videos about but nobody to play with, so we met up after school and made…
P might not be NP, reckons Norbert Blum
Norbert Blum of Universität Bonn has uploaded to the arXiv a preprint of a paper claiming to resolve the problem of whether $\mathrm{P} = \mathrm{NP}$, in the negative. “Proofs” one way or the other turn up on the arXiv pretty much every day, but this one might actually be correct. At least, it’s not immediately…
Review: Factris
Removing four lines at once with an I-piece in Tetris is the most efficient way to score, which creates a tension: on one hand, you want to build high enough to score quickly, but on the other, building too high puts you at risk of ending the game. The balance between the two is exquisite.…
Landon Clay, founder of the Clay Mathematics Institute, has died
The Clay Mathematics Institute, home of the Clay Millennium Maths Prizes, has announced the sad death of its founder, Landon Clay. “Driven by a deep appreciation of the beauty and importance of mathematical ideas”, Clay donated generously to many organisations and projects, including the Institute which he founded in 1998.
Statement on the CMI website, including an addendum from Andrew Wiles
via @LondMathSoc
Carnival of Mathematics 148
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of July, and compiled by Kartik, is now online at Comfortably Numbered. 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.
Maths at the Edinburgh Fringe
Every August a multitude of comedy shows, theatre pieces, interpretive dance performances, musical extravaganzas and spoken word events spring up all over the Edinburgh Fringe. As a busy mathematician (there are infinitely many integers; who has spare time?) I’m sure you’ll appreciate our guide to which of those things are mathematical, or have a tangential…
News of some significance
You may have heard of the replicability crisis in science, and practices like outcome switching and p-hacking. BuzzFeed reports on a paper that proposes a solution: rather than assign statistical significance at $p=0.05$, change this value to $0.005$.
Sir David Spiegelhalter is quoted saying: “Dealing with the size of the p-value fixes some things. But it’s not dealing with the most important issues.” There’s a lot more in the BuzzFeed article and the full paper.
More information
PsyArXiv preprint: Redefine statistical significance.
BuzzFeed: These People Are Trying To Fix A Huge Problem In Science.