In a remarkable example of us being psychic (or, what’s also known as ‘a coincidence’), our recently posted introduction to the game of Go has been made more topical by actual Go-related news. The game of Go has long been considered a difficult game for artificial intelligences to play – much more so than chess, which has plenty of…
We bumped into Robert at the last MathsJam conference. He spoke so enthusiastically about Go, and how easy it is to get started, that we asked him if he could write a guide for someone who wants to get into the game. Here it is! This article is designed for those who want to learn Go or read…
Before Christmas, we launched a winter-themed maths competition – to design a sensible hexagonal snowflake, using a square grid, which could be used to knit a wintery jumper and not a) look terrible or b) have non-hexagonal symmetry. We had a deluge of entries, some valid and others less so – in fact, we may have…
Breaking news! On 19th January 2016, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search discovered a new largest prime number – we know 49 Mersenne primes, the largest of which is now $2^{74207281}-1$, a number containing over 22 million digits and full of primey goodness. Internet Maths Person Matt Parker has responded to the news in spectacular style,…
In 2015 The Aperiodical went from strength to strength again, with 179 posts published by 18 authors. I’ve collected our ten most popular posts from 2015, in case you missed them.
I have to say, I chuckled: the week Relatively Prime hits ‘noteworthy’ on iTunes is the week Samuel discusses using maths to do well in popularity contests. Coincidence? I think not. To me, episode 3 of the second series represents something of a return to form for one of the top half-dozen maths podcasts around;…
Marcus du Sautoy has teamed up with animator Simon Russell to create this animatino to accompany Messiaen’s Quartet for the end of time. It’s got all the usual arty maths things in it – the Fibonacci sequence and golden ratio, prime numbers, polygons and polyhedra of all sorts – as well as the less well-trodden sporadic group…