A chap called Jonathan Kinlay has innovented a Rubik’s cube variant which only has one colour, but six different integer sequences on its sides. As a colourblind integer sequence enthusiast, this basically has to be my ideal Christmas present, right? Well, it’s currently looking for funding on Kickstarter in advance of actually existing, and the first…
Nirvana by Numbers
Alex Bellos has made another documentary for BBC Radio 4, this time about the number zero. It’s a pleasant bit of numerical tourism, as Alex travels to India to find the source of the number zero in a small shrine, with a diversion to talk about Vedic maths along the way. You can listen to…
Council orders maths & Sudoku to be removed from mathematician’s gravestone
There is a fine tradition of mathematicians with mathematics on their tombstones. What immediately springs to mind is Ludolph Van Ceulen and Jacob Bernoulli. Van Ceulen calculated $\pi$ to 35 decimal places; his grave carried both his lower bound of 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288 and his upper bound of 3.14159265358979323846264338327950289. Bernoulli asked for a logarithmic spiral on his…
Eugenia Cheng is at it again
Dr Eugenia Cheng, category theorist, has accepted some money from Pizza Express in return for writing some nonsense about pizzas. This doesn’t really merit a post here, apart from to point out that Dr Cheng very scrupulously denied taking any kind of payment the last time she got a “formula for the perfect X” story…
Carnival of Mathematics 103
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of September, and compiled by Evelyn Lamb, is now online at Roots of Unity. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.
BBC News webchat with Simon Singh
Today, author Simon Singh took part in a Twitter-based webchat for the BBC News website, taking questions about his new book on Maths in the Simpsons, and mathematics in general. Here’s how it all went down.
My teaching in 2013/14
Some people have expressed an interest in what I am teaching this year. Here it is.