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.
Carnival of Mathematics #131
MathsJam talks now online
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…
Relatively Prime Recap: Season 2, Episode 6: Principia Metropolica
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…
Wherein CLP “improves” Chinese New Year
You know what doesn’t need improving? The ancient Chinese calendar, which has kept time for thousands of years. That didn’t stop Christian.
Open Season: Pancake Flipping
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…
GCHQ Christmas puzzles winners and solutions announced
Before Christmas, the benign megasurveillance bods at GCHQ released a set of festive puzzles, in the form of a Christmas card and associated website. An initial nonogram puzzle led to a sequence of increasingly fiendish teasers, and solvers of the final set of puzzles were invited to email in their answers, with the correctest winning a…
Relatively Prime Recap: Season 2, Episode 5: Other Duties As Assigned
For about 40 minutes of this week’s episode of Relatively Prime (Number 5 of 8, already? Good heavens!), Samuel Hansen looks like he’s managed to escape from his shameful, borderline criminal, past in Las Vegas. But he’s pulled back in for one last job, which is a debacle, of course.