Long-time Aperiodical muse David Cushing has made a bet with us that he can give us an interesting post every Friday for the next ten weeks. Every week that he sends a post, we buy him a bar of chocolate. Every week that he doesn’t send us a post, he buys us a bar of…
Scrooge McDuck in Mathmagic land
A sympathetic story for you this Saturday. Andy has a problem. He can’t solve it on his own – he needs your help. This problem vexed Andy so much that he spent four years trying to solve it on his own, to no avail. It really is a very difficult problem. Finally in 1997, out…
Bound on prime gaps bound decreasing by leaps and bounds
Update 17/06/2013: The gap is down to 60,744. That’s a whole order of magnitude down from where it started! When Yitang Zhang unexpectedly announced a proof that that there are infinitely many pairs of primes less than 70 million apart from each other – a step on the way to the twin primes conjecture – certain internet…
What colour shirt do mathematicians wear?
Readers of The Aperiodical may recall three excellent posts on the Maths of Star Trek by Jim ‘But Not As We Know It’ Grime. At the same time, Jim discussed the topic in glorious audio with Andy Holding and Will Thompson, hosts of the Science of Fiction podcast (worth listening to, but at least visit…
Integer Sequence Review: A052486
The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences contains over 200,000 sequences. It contains classics, curios, thousands of derivatives entered purely for completeness’s sake, short sequences whose completion would be a huge mathematical achievement, and some entries which are just downright silly. For a lark, David and I have decided to review some of the Encyclopedia’s sequences.…
Carnival of Mathematics 99
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of May, is now online at Wild About Math!. 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.
Maths at the Cheltenham Science Festival
Next week, scientists, science fans and science communicators will converge on Cheltenham town hall for a week of high-quality science festival. But how much of the programme is given over to the queen of all sciences, Mathematics? Here’s a list of some of the events going on we’d be interested in going to.