One of the last surviving Bletchley Park codebreakers, Jerry Roberts, has died aged 93. He was one of a small group of codebreakers who decrypted messages from the German High Command, including the German plans for the battle of Kursk. He initially worked on the Double Playfair hand cipher used by the German police, and…
Guesting on the ‘Wrong, But Useful’ first anniversary episode
You may recall that Samuel Hansen and I used to have a weekly conversation about mathematics in the news and news in mathematics, which we called the Math/Maths Podcast and released through the (still going!) science communication project Pulse-Project. When we put Math/Maths on hiatus (the length of which is still an open question), this…
MC Hammer is mathematically untouchable
Happy birthday to MC Hammer who, at age 52, is now mathematically untouchable.
Math Awareness Month 2014
Hey, you! Are you aware of MATH? Well, of course you’d say yes. But every year the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics runs a Math Awareness Month in April as an excuse to promote a load of great materials and events designed to attract other people to the subject.
James Grime’s house-building problem
Aperiodipal James Grime has put a new video on his YouTube channel. He’s got a problem to do with building houses: But James posts fantastic videos about maths puzzles all the time; what’s so notable about this one? I was involved, that’s what! The puzzle can be done on pen and paper but it involves…
Yakov Sinai awarded the 2014 Abel Prize
The Abel Prize for 2014 has gone to Yakov Sinai of Princeton University, “for his fundamental contributions to dynamical systems, ergodic theory, and mathematical physics”.
Everyone’s a mathematician
This morning Katie and I had a little discussion about house style on The Aperiodical. Mathematican Paul Taylor was listed as “Mathematician Paul Taylor” in the blurb for his featured post. I posited that everyone published here is a mathematician, so the “Mathematician” title is redundant. This of course resulted in me writing a userscript…