Last weekend mathematician Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman passed away. A giant of mathematics research, he worked in geometry, topology, knot theory and singularity theory, and was also a great populariser of mathematics. He gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 1978 – not only was this the first time the lectures had been on the subject of mathematics, it…
It’s daylight outside at the moment, which hasn’t been the case for pretty much any of the past few months up here in the North-East of England. That means Spring is on its way, so my cleaning and tidying instinct has activated. We’ve had the same layout here since 2013, I think, so it was high…
Welcome to the 131st edition of the Carnival of Mathematics, a monthly blogging carnival which scoots its way round the internet, rounding up maths-related blog posts from the month of January.
The talk summaries and slides from last November’s MathsJam conference are now online! MathsJam is a monthly maths night that takes place in over 30 pubs all over the world, and it’s also an annual weekend conference in November. The conference comprises 5-minute talks on all kinds of topics in and related to mathematics, particularly recreational…
I’ve been looking forward to this one: cities in the mathematical domain. This is the kind of applied maths I can really get behind. Samuel starts with Mike Batty of University College, London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis discussing how cities grow and organise themselves. The structure is frequently fractal; how does one calculate the…
You know what doesn’t need improving? The ancient Chinese calendar, which has kept time for thousands of years. That didn’t stop Christian.
In this series of articles, I’m writing about mathematical questions we don’t know the answer to – which haven’t yet been proven or disproven. This edition is a topical one, for Pancake Day (Shrove Tuesday, celebrated in the UK this year on 9th February). Some of the best mathematical teasers are those which originate in a…