I have a paper published online-first by BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. This means it is online and will be in an upcoming issue. My title is: ‘The unplanned impact of mathematics’ and its implications for research funding: a discussion-led educational activity. Abstract:
It’s bunnies all the way down – GeoBunnies reveals geometry’s hidden rabbits
Theorem: You can turn any shape into a rabbit by adding a face, ears and a tail to it. Proof (by construction): geobunnies.com This is delightful. There’s a new school of Platonism, one which believes that not only do ideal shapes exist, so do the bunnies inside them. Joy!
Am I a Mathematician?
I describe myself in my mini-bio as a Maths Enthusiast, Egyptologist and Streetdancer. Can I upgrade myself from Maths Enthusiast to Mathematician? The answer to this question is a cultural one. We can put aside the question of whether mathematics itself is ‘real’ or not. The names we give to the people that do maths,…
Twitter’s favourite fictional mathematicians
Katie Steckles discovers there are way more fictional mathematicians than you might expect.
Bell’s Theorem Way
A street in Belfast is to be named after the late John Stewart Bell, a quantum physicist whose work has had a huge impact on modern physics and quantum information theory. Bell passed away in 1990, before he could be awarded a Nobel prize for his work, and Belfast Council have agreed to name a…
‘All that glitters is not golden’: a Fibonacci Day Roundup
Yesterday was 23/11, also known in some parts as 11/23, and you may recognise this as being a date made of the first four Fibonacci numbers. (Such numerical date-based Fibonacci coincidences haven’t been as exciting since 5/8/13, but at least this is one we can celebrate annually.) This meant that mathematicians everywhere got excited about #FibonacciDay, and spent…
Alexandre Grothendieck 1928–2014
Here’s a small collection of links to articles about Alexandre Grothendieck, French/German mathematician and algebraic geometer, who died on Wednesday 13 November aged 86. He was a pioneer in the field, and has been described as ‘the greatest mathematician of the 20th century’.