Every time I use the jealous husbands river crossing problem, I prefix it with a waffly apology about its formulation. You’ll see what I mean; here’s a standard statement of the puzzle: Three married couples want to cross a river in a boat that is capable of holding only two people at a time, with…
As part of our special Apéry takeover today, I chatted to mathematicians Ben Sparks and James Grime, to find out what we know about the mathematics Apéry did – it’s an enjoyable 10-minute listen. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Subscribe: RSS | List of episodes
Christian’s put together this fun applet for exploring the Zeta function – you can move your pointer around to reveal the value of $\zeta$ at each point in the complex plane. The hue (colour) revealed is the argument of the value, and the lightness (bright to dark) represents the magnitude. There’s a blog post over at…
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…