Numberphile, the supremum over all YouTube channels, has scored a bit of a coup – Brady has sat down and recorded an interview with the famously Internet-reclusive John Conway. In this first video (there’s a bonus one linked at the end of this one, and I hope there’ll be more) John talks about his love/hate…
Puzzlebomb – March 2014
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 27 of Puzzlebomb, for March 2014, can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 27 – March 2014 The solutions to Issue 27 can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 27 – March 2014 – Solutions Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
Erdős’s discrepancy problem now less of a problem
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…