The last time we posted about Minecraft, someone had made a scientific and graphing calculator. But now someone’s made something actually useful: a Rubik’s cube! Mastercrafter SethBling uploaded this video showing his fully-working Rubik’s cube, created entirely from standard Minecraft blocks: [youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUEUuurc9u4] Download the world: SethBling’s RubiksCube via Jacob Aron on Twitter
Visual Insight by John Baez
John Baez, the very first maths blogger, has started a new blog called Visual Insight. It’s hosted by the American Mathematical Society and is “a place to share striking images that help explain advanced topics in mathematics.” So that’ll be nice. Go there: Visual Insight – Mathematics Made Visible
Translate Numberphile, please / Traduisez Numberphile, s’il-vous-plaît / Bitte übersetzen Numberphile…
Numberphile is that cool YouTube channel with the videos about the numbers and the philes. You might remember them from the time they did that ace video about our integer sequence reviews. But if you’re unlucky enough not to understand the English as she is spoke, then that’s no use to you. But it could…
Deligne Day: October 5, 2013
A bit of press release copy-pasting for you now, as the Simons Foundation announced a celebration of the mathematics of Pierre Deligne. When the release first went out it was called ‘Deligne Day’, but cooler heads have prevailed and it’s now “A Celebration of the Mathematics of Pierre Deligne”. It’s also my dad’s birthday, as…
‘Low barrier, high ceiling’ and the Maths Arcade
I’ve been catching up with the TES Maths Podcast. I just listened to episode 7, towards the end of which guest Brian Arnold shares ‘the Frogs puzzle’. You probably know this, but if not Brian points to the NRICH interactive version which explains: Imagine two red frogs and two blue frogs sitting on lily pads,…
Maths Careers Poster Competition 2013/14
The IMA Maths Careers website has launched its annual poster competition. This time in collaboration with the British Museum’s Citi Money Gallery and part of the Mathematics of Planet Earth, the competition asks entrants to design a single global currency: Imagine there was a single global currency; what would it look like? How big would…
Computational mathematics in the cloud with Sagemath
Sage is a free, open-source computational mathematics system in the vein of things like Mathematica and Maple. For the past few years, there’s been an online version called the Sage Notebook which worked pretty well, but it was pretty slow and not particularly easy to use. Now the creator of Sage, William Stein, has started work…