Cambridge North is a brand new train station, and the building’s got a fab bit of cladding with a design ‘derived from John Horton Conway’s “Game of Life” theories which he established while at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1970.’ One problem: that’s Wolfram’s Rule 135, not the Game of Life. You can tell because…
Mastodon is a new social network, heavily inspired by Twitter but with a few differences: tweets are called toots, it’s populated by tusksome mammals instead of little birds, and it’s designed to run in a decentralised manner – anyone can set up their own ‘instance’ and connect to everyone else using the GNU Social protocol. Colin…
News from France, where the family of the late Alexandre Grothendieck, legend of basically all maths, have finally reached an agreement with the academic community about his huge archive of written notes. Discussions have been ongoing for a while but it’s finally been agreed that the notes can be released online for the community at…
A collection of this month’s best maths blog posts
Any book on cryptography written for a more-or-less lay audience must inevitably face comparisons to The Code Book, written in 1999 by Simon Singh, the king of distilling complex subjects to a few hundred pages of understandable writing. While Singh’s book is a pretty thorough history of codes and codebreaking ((I will in this review…
Katie’s done another video! This time it’s a neat method for constructing an egg-shape, using arcs of circles. Bonus challenge: See if you can count how many times Katie accidentally says ‘compass’ instead of ‘pair of compasses’ during the video.
Earlier this week my sister-in-law (“SIL” from now on) sent me an email asking for help. She’s a dance teacher, and her class need to rehearse their group pieces before their exam. She’d been trying to work out how to timetable the groups’ rehearsals, and couldn’t make it all fit together. So of course, she…