You may remember a couple of years ago there was a conviction of seven men in Italy, widely reported as being for failing to predict an earthquake. Actually, there was a little more to it — the conviction related to a supposed “falsely reassuring statement” given to the public — but, still, the scientific community’s…
Your favourite mathematical party trick has a snazzy website
Ariel Procaccia and Jonathan Goldman of Carnegie Mellon University have taken it upon themselves to make fair division problems easier to solve with a flashy new website called Spliddit (eyy, fuhgeddaboudit).
New Mersenne primes not discovered
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, the premier distributed-computing prime finding initiative, has reported that $M_{32582657} = 2^{32,582,657}-1$, the 44th Mersenne prime to be discovered, is also the 44th Mersenne Prime in numerical order. It was found by Steven Boone and Curtis Cooper in 2006 (Cooper also discovered the current largest prime as reported here in February), but until…
The conclusions you can draw from this graph will SHOCK you
This is a blog post based on a Google+ post about a tweet. I can only hope that it will inspire a further flourishing of vines, instagrams and Yo!-s. I saw this graph (originally from job stats site msgooroo.com) posted by a functional programming news site: The accompanying tweet said “More reasons to choice Functional…
Logically Policed
This is a nice short documentary by student filmmaker Damiano Petrucci about mathematics and mathematicians, why they do maths and how they communicate it. It’s got a load of names you’ll recognise, including Oxford’s Ben Green and Aperiodipal Matt Parker. via Colin Wright, who’s also in it!
K sera, sera: board of the Journal of K-Theory resigns (again) and starts a new journal (again)
The rumours are true: the editors which in 2007 resigned from the journal K-Theory have now resigned from the splinter journal they helped set up, Journal of K-Theory, to start a third journal, Annals of K-Theory. What a headache!
News Round-up, 21/10/14
Here’s some quick stories from the world of maths this week.