Nothing puts your home insurance premium up like having been burgled in the past – because it means you’re more likely to be burgled again. Stanford researcher Nancy Rodríguez, with colleagues Henri Berestycki (who is first author, for the record) and Lenya Ryzhik, has developed a travelling waves model to explain this phenomenon – and,…
Formula for BMI has an ‘ill-founded definition’
Have you ever calculated your BMI and been given a reading of ‘overweight’, when you clearly aren’t? Or maybe you’ve been training hard in the gym but your BMI has increased? Many of us, including GPs and fitness instructors, use BMI as an indicator of whether we are ‘fit and healthy’ and reliably use it…
Aperiodcast – 11/02/2013
Two days late, because that is the way we rotate here, it’s another episode of our sporadic navel-gazing podcast. In this episode we talked about: Our piece on the Invariant Subspace Problem (and the more recent news) Log-log! Who’s there? Not a power law! Our coverage of the new Mersenne Prime news, and our meta-coverage of everyone…
Collaborative Mathematics: kids (and non-kids) work together on problems over YouTube
Jason Ermer’s Collaborative Mathematics project has launched its first video challenge. The project aims to allow mathematics to happen collaboratively via the medium of online videos, and video responses. The idea is that having watched the challenge video, you work with a group of friends (collaboratively) and post a response video, and then watch others’ response…
Your help needed: survey of international mathematical cultures
Dr Aiping Xu of Coventry University is asking staff who have experience of mathematics education in the UK and other countries to complete a short questionnaire as part of a survey of international mathematical cultures for the Higher Education Academy. The questionnaire explains the purpose of the study. A growing number of international students study…
Talk: Computability of Bass-Serre structures in the Grzegorczyk hierarchy
I’m going to abuse this here organ of mine ((phrasing?!?!)) to show off a thing I did yesterday. My chum the inimitable David Cushing has started a postgrad pure maths seminar at Newcastle. Because there are only a few pure postgrads here, he asked me to give a talk about the stuff I was looking at for…
‘Of little practical value’?
Paul Taylor has taken the opportunity to see what we can learn about the British press’s attitude and ability when it comes to the reporting of big numbers ending in a 1.