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“How can you do coursework for maths?” What I marked this year
A while ago I was helping out at an open day. The material presented gave some information about the range of assessment types we use. A potential applicant asked me “how can you do coursework for maths?”. She felt that (what she understood as) maths could only be assessed by examination. (This is presumably because…
CLP reads “Non-sexist solution to the ménage problem”
I rediscovered this nice paper by Kenneth P. Bogart in my Interesting Esoterica collection, and decided to read through it. It turned out that, while the solution presented is very neat, there’s quite a bit of hard work to do to along the way. I’m not particularly experienced with combinatorics, so the little facts that the…
There was a “beauty of maths” garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. Yeah, sure, why not
The Winton Beauty of Mathematics Garden was an entry in this year’s Chelsea Flower Show. It looks like this: Apparently those symbols winding their way around the garden are “plant growth algorithms”, whatever those are. There’s also a golden-ratio-thingy water feature, of course. You can thank Winton Capital, sponsors of all sorts of worthy maths projects, for…
This video about the proof of the Kelmans-Seymour conjecture is adorable
Theorem: every 5-connected non-planar graph contains a subdivision of $K_5$. The above statement, conjectured independently by Alexander Kelmans and Paul Seymour in the 70s, is very easy to say. And the video below, starring Dawei He, Yan Wang, and Xingxing Yu, makes it look very easy to prove: It’s like they got Wes Anderson to film an academic PR…
Maths and stats on Radio 1!
Maths and stats! On BBC Radio 1! Who’d’ve though it! DJ Clara Amfo and the ubiquitous Hannah Fry have got a new series on the UK’s top pop station, looking at music from a mathematical perspective. Music by Numbers (excuse me, Music by Num83r5), is currently being broadcast at 9pm each Tuesday, and there are a couple…
A new home for Interesting Esoterica
Since 2010, I’ve been maintaining a list of “interesting esoterica” – papers, books, essays and poems that I find interesting entirely on their own merits. It’s mainly bits of esoteric maths – hence the name – but I’ve also included quite a few things just because they have amusing titles. The main idea is that when…