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.
Puzzlebomb – April 2016
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 52 of Puzzlebomb, for April 2016, can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 52 – April 2016 The solutions to Issue 52 can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 52 – April 2016 – Solutions Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found at Puzzlebomb.co.uk.
Not mentioned on The Aperiodical, March 2016
There’s been a lot of maths news this month, but we’ve all been too busy to keep up with it. So, in case you missed anything, here’s a summary of the biggest stories this month. We’ve got two new facts about primes, the best way of packing spheres in lots of dimensions, and the ongoing debate…
EE = maths × sums²
Countdown number-nerd Lovely Rachel Riley has appeared in the latest advert for mobile phone agglomerate EE, alongside massive film node Kevin Bacon. In the advert, Riley is unable to work out how anyone could not be enticed by the high mobile internet speeds (50% faster, apparently) offered by the company who are paying her to not be able…
Carnival of Mathematics 132
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of February, and compiled by Brent, is now online at The Math Less Travelled. 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…
GCHQ has declassified James Ellis’s papers on public key cryptography
Robert Hannigan, the Director of British intelligence agency GCHQ, gave a speech at MIT recently on the currently contentious issue of backdoors into encryption. To accompany his speech, and maybe to reaffirm GCHQ’s credentials on the subject, he published two papers written by James Ellis in 1970 about what would become public key encryption: “The Possibility of…