This is a puzzle I presented at the MathsJam conference. It’s a problem that gave me a headache for a week or so, and I thought others might enjoy it, too. I do know the answer, but I’m not going to give it away — you can tweet me @icecolbeveridge if you want to discuss…
From the Mailbag: Dual Inversal Numbers
Katie, one of our editors, has been contacted by Brendan with a question about some maths he’s been investigating. Read on to find out what he’s discovered, and read Katie’s response. Dear The Aperiodical, I’ve noticed an interesting property of numbers, and I wondered if you could tell me if this is something which is…
Review: X&Y
If you have ever wanted to see Marcus du Sautoy reduced in size and placed in a laundry bag, then this is the mathematical play for you!
Ada Lovelace Day Book out now
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…
Recent history
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…
Dark days for MathML support in browsers
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 – November 2013
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.