Ada Lovelace Day was on 15th October this year. It’s an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths, comprising blog posts about women scientists as well as live events around the world. The nice people at FindingAda.com, the home of the Ada Lovelace Day project, have collated a set…
I am preparing a talk for our undergraduate Maths Society (perhaps ill-advisedly) with the title ‘A brief history of mathematics: 5,000 years from Egypt to Nottingham Trent’. This will be a stampede through some very selected hightlights, starting with some arm waving about pyramids and ending with something modern. In fact, as well as some…
For a brief moment at the start of the year, Google’s Chrome browser could render mathematical notation written in MathML. Since then, things have got worse for mathematics on the web. In February, the MathML rendering code was removed by Google, citing concerns about security and code quality. Now, a member of the Chromium team has…
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 23 of Puzzlebomb, for November 2013, can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 23 – November 2013 The solutions to Issue 23 can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 23 – November 2013 – Solutions Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
A bit of slightly overdue but welcome news: the arXiv has enabled MathJax on paper abstract pages. Authors have regularly been using LaTeX syntax in their titles and abstracts, but now the arXiv typesets them automatically for you.
Evelyn Lamb is a professional mathematician who has taken up journalism on the side. She received the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship last year, and spent the summer writing for the magazine Scientific American. We talked to her about maths journalism, the challenges involved in making advances accessible to a wider audience, and the differences between blogging and…
There’s been some progress on the bounded gaps between primes front since we last checked in. The Polymath8 project has got the gap down to $4,680$. But that’s small beans: James Maynard, a postgrad student at Oxford, announced at a meeting in Oberwolfach that he has got the gap down to $700$. Emmanuel Kowalski has…