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.…
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
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.
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…
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.
PsyArXiv preprint: Redefine statistical significance.
BuzzFeed: These People Are Trying To Fix A Huge Problem In Science.
As of next month, you’ll be able to type TeX maths into Office 365 apps and it’ll work.
See the announcement on the Microsoft Developer blog for more details. Warning: it’s a bit complicated.
We’ve been sent a copy of Matthew Lane’s Power-Up: Unlocking the Hidden Mathematics in Video Games, and despatched Aperiodical regular and video game fan Paul Taylor to review it.