One of my earliest memories is being woken up very early and sitting on the sofa under a blanket to watch telly. This was a treat. We were never allowed to watch telly in the morning and it was almost as if we were watching telly in bed. Fantastic. On the telly were some people…
Thinking Mathematically
After this year’s Maths Jam weekend, Liz Hind said she wished she had a blog. Now she does! We welcome Liz to The Aperiodical and her new column, Thoughts of a Maths Enthusiast. At Maths Jam I surprised several people when I told them I didn’t have a maths degree. Why was this surprising? They expected…
Is this a nonsense formula for the perfect TV episode?
Stardate November, 2014. These are the continuing adventures of the website The Aperiodical. Its mission: to explore the pages of strange newspapers, to catalogue nonsense formulas, to boldly disapprove of them in ways no blog has done before. What a joy it was to open my browser this morning and see this delicious headline waiting for me: (by…
Carnival of Mathematics 116
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of October, and compiled by Stephen Cavadino, is now online at CavMaths. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.
Le Livre de l’Incomplétude is a lovely take on incompleteness
This is a really nice idea. Le Livre de l’Incomplétude (The Book of Incompleteness) is an “artistic appropriation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem,” initiated by artist Débora Bertol. The superficial understanding of that theorem is that every consistent formal theory contains truths which can’t be proved inside that theory, so the book’s conceit is that it will catalogue as many…
L’Aquila earthquake convictions overturned
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).