Cushing was injured in a serious maths accident recently (he fell out of the bath) so I wanted to assess the damage to his number-wrangling faculties. Fortunately, there’s the National Numeracy Challenge, which begins with a test to pinpoint your weak areas. National Numeracy is a charity that wants every adult in the UK to “reach a level of numeracy skills that…
Let’s play a game: Imagine you have some playing cards. Of course if you actually have some cards you don’t need to imagine! Pick your favourite natural number $n$ and put a deck of $n$ cards in front of you. Then repeat the next step until the deck is empty. Take $2$ cards from the…
I recently tried to blow some clever soap bubbles to demonstrate some maths concepts to some students. It went terribly. Juan Bragado is much better at blowing mathematical bubbles, so he’s made this gentle video showing all sorts of soapy polyhedra, and other mathematical shapes made from bubbles. [youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEXj69hCi44] via John Golden on Twitter
Doodal is a happy little toy which helps you draw fractals. This video explains how: It’s a Flash applet, which means it doesn’t work on mobile devices :( Play Doodal
Professor Stephen Hawking’s name appeared in the papers recently next to some nonsense formula about football, promoting a betting company. Even you, Stephen? Is it as bad as it looks?
Group theorists, often interested principally in the abstract, have been known to neglect the vital importance of producing funky gizmos that exhibit the symmetries they have theorized about. Internet maths celeb Vi Hart, working with mathematician Henry Segerman, has addressed this absence in the case of $Q_8$, the quaternion group. The object they’ve designed is four-dimensional…
The tenth instalment of weird and wonderful maths links from around the internet, curated by Christian.