This is a guest post by mathematician and maths communicator Ben Sparks. Roger Apéry: 14th November 1916 – 18th December 1994 100 years ago (on 14th November) was born a Frenchman called Roger Apéry. He died in 1994, is buried in Paris, and upon his tombstone is the cryptic inscription: \[ 1 + \frac{1}{8} + \frac{1}{27} +\frac{1}{64}…
Today is the 100th anniversary of Roger Apéry’s birth, and we’re The Aperiodical, so we just had to make a big deal of it. So, for all of today, we’re The Apéryodical. Throughout today we’ve got a few posts about Apéry and the thing he’s most closely associated with: the Riemann zeta function. For now, here’s a really…
Here’s a round-up of some of the news from this month. Never-ending Turing centenary, part XLVI The Alan Turing centenary shows no signs of abating. First of all, there’s a marvellous new art installation under Paddington Bridge in London, in memory of Turing. There’s also a theatre piece called Breaking the Code, showing at Manchester’s Royal…
Spanish independent publisher Kronecker Wallis is making a new edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematicia, using a Kickstarter campaign to fund the initial print run. Here’s their video: It looks like it’ll be a fairly pretty object, and they’ve put a lot of time and thought into choosing the paper, fonts and layout. Their Kickstarter runs…
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 59 of Puzzlebomb, for November 2016, can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 59 – November 2016 (printer-friendly version) The solutions to Issue 59 can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 59 – November 2016 – Solutions Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
Edmund Harriss is a very good friend of the Aperiodical, and a mathematical artist of quite some renown. His latest project is CURVAHEDRA, a system of bendable boomerang-like pieces which join together to make all sorts of geometrical structures.
Reader of the site Bhaskar Hari Phadke has written in to tell us this fun fact about the number $25641$. It’s easier to show than to describe, so here goes: \begin{align} 25641 \times \color{blue}{1} \times 4 &= \color{blue}{1}02564 \\ 25641 \times \color{blue}{2} \times 4 &= \color{blue}{2}05128 \\ 25641 \times \color{blue}{3} \times 4 &= \color{blue}{3}07692 \\ 25641 \times…