Boris Konev and Alexei Lisitsa of the University of Liverpool have been looking at sequences of $+1$s and $-1$s, and have shown using an SAT-solver-based proof that every sequence of $1161$ or more elements has a subsequence which sums to at least $2$. This extends the existing long-known result that every such sequence of $12$ or more elements…
Everyone’s terrible at maths, survey finds
A recent study commissioned by Nationwide Building Society has revealed that more than one in four girls want to drop maths at 14, that less than half of 12-13 year old students surveyed could correctly calculate their change from £100 when paying for shopping worth £64.23, and that 76% of those who would choose to drop…
Manchester MathsJam Writeup, February 2014
We started the evening with a logic puzzle Paul had found on Stack Exchange, which is detailed in the diagram we drew:
Ghostcube by Erik Åberg
[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85LJh4sFi_M] Erik Åberg is selling a short documentary about these lovely foldy cubes on his website. via Will Davies on Twitter
Babbage’s difference engine is really, really pretty
Hands up if you knew there was a working replica of Babbage’s difference engine in California. (My hand is not up.) This glorious machine lives in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. A company called xRez Studio, which specialises in taking extremely high resolution gigapixel photos of things, has taken some extremely high…
You have completed level 8. Game over. Insert coin.
(See QCF.) That is to say, the university have sent me a degree certificate, and I’ve shown it to the bank. So that’s pretty darn official.
The neuroscience of mathematical beauty, or, Equation beauty contest!
Neuroscientists Semir Zeki and John Paul Romaya have put mathematicians in an MRI scanner and shown them equations, in an attempt to discover whether mathematical beauty is comparable to the experience derived from great art. They’ve detailed the results in a paper titled “The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates”. Here’s a bit…