As part of our massive π day celebrations, The Aperiodical has challenged me with the task of assembling a group of mathematicians, some bits of cardboard and string, and a video camera, and attempting to determine the exact value of π, for your entertainment. The challenge, which was to be completed without a calculator, involved using known mathematical formulae for…
George Boole at 200
Happy birthday AND many happy returns to George Boole, 200 this year! The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, has helped launch University College Cork’s year of festivities celebrating Boole, their first professor of maths and the inventor of Boolean algebra. The year’s activities will include the restoration of Boole’s first home in Cork, an official film biography, an…
The John Riordan prize for the best solution to an unsolved problem in the OEIS
As mentioned previously, the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences is 50 this year. To celebrate that fact, and to encourage readers to concentrate on filling in the gaps in the missing entries instead of just adding new ones, there’s a \$1,000 prize for the best solution to an open problem posed in an OEIS entry. The announcement…
How I Wish I Could Celebrate Pi
People with an interest in date coincidences are probably already getting themselves slightly over-excited about the fact that this month will include what can only be described as Ultimate π Day. That is, on 14th March 2015, written under certain circumstances by some people as 3/14/15, we’ll be celebrating the closest that the date can…
Puzzlebomb – March 2015
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 39 of Puzzlebomb, for March 2015, can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 39 – March 2015 The solutions to Issue 39 can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 39 – March 2015 – Solutions Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
Wolfram|Alpha can’t. But CP can!
Christian Perfect has turned into a one-man plug for the holes in Wolfram|Alpha.
Each pair of smartphones has exactly one Dobble app in common
Card game fans might be familiar with the game of Dobble, in which a set of cards featuring symbols is laid out on the table, and family members tear each other’s hands off/eyes out in order to find the one symbol a given pair of cards has in common. Well, it’s now also available virtually!