Here’s something fun you might want to spend some money on: a poster of the Mandelbrot set, in the style of an old-fashioned navigation chart. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/billtavis/mandelmap-poster-a-vintage-style-map-of-the-mandel The Kickstarter has already racked up many multiples of the original funding goal with three weeks still to go, so it’s at the “effectively a pre-order” stage. The posters start at \$26. Kickstarter: Mandelmap…
Steinberg’s conjecture is false
Conjecture Every planar graph without 4-cycles and 5-cycles is 3-colourable. Nope! In a paper just uploaded to the arXiv, Vincent Cohen-Addad, Michael Hebdige, Daniel Kral, Zhentao Li and Esteban Salgado show the construction of a graph with no cycles of length 4 or 5 which isn’t 3-colourable: it isn’t possible to assign colours to its vertices so that no…
Approximate a ratio by folding a piece of paper
Warning: you could make a very strong argument I’ve thought far too much about something inconsequential. If that makes your stomach turn, look away now. This morning in the shower, I had an idle thought about my towel. It was, as always, folded neatly on the toilet seat. A problem that’s been bugging me for a few…
Carnival of Mathematics 133
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of March, and compiled by Matthew, is now online at Chalkdust Magazine. 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.
Mind Games: 6 Nimmt!
In this series of posts, Katie will be going on about some of her favourite board games and card games, and some of the interesting mathematics to be found there. If you’d like the chance to play a mathematical board game, why not find or start a Maths Arcade at university, or join your local MathsJam. 6…
Maths Object: Correntator
Here’s another one of my favourite maths objects: the Correntator. It’s a simple mechanical tool to add up amounts of money. I bought it for about a tenner (new money) at a market. This video is extremely shonky. Blame my phone, which can’t bring itself to record for more than 250 seconds at a time.…
Erdős-Bacon: previously unknown collaboration
Previously unseen footage has been unearthed by The Aperiodical’s crack team of investigative journalists of Kevin Bacon and Paul Erdős writing a paper together, and a still from this is shown above. This has massive consequences for the important topics of Erdős numbers, Bacon numbers and Erdős-Bacon numbers.