Christmas is a time for giving, celebrating, family and magic. But did you know it’s also a time for equations? Department store Debenhams has decided to honour this recent Christmas tradition by tasking at least two members of Sheffield University’s undergraduate maths society to come up with formulae for ‘a perfectly decorated Christmas tree‘, picked…
Interview: Alan Turing Cryptography competition
The University of Manchester is holding another cryptography competition (as featured in this news post earlier this week). We spoke to Charles Walkden, one of the competition’s organisers, about the project.
Matt Parker’s Fractal Christmas Tree
Stand-up Mathematician and all-round maths lover Matt Parker has been busy again, and he’s made a set of free worksheets for teachers (and, of course, interested non-teachers) to assemble paper nets of 3D fractals, including a Menger sponge and Sierpinski tetrahedron (which I’ve just learned is also called a tetrix). There’s also a sheet for making…
Podcasting update
I have a job. This is not the podcasting update, but it does affect it! If you have listened to the latest Math/Maths Podcast you will know that I will be lecturing mathematics from January while trying to finish my PhD thesis, and that we will be putting that podcast on hiatus while I do…
Math/Maths 123: Ups and Downs
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released. A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. This week Samuel and Peter spoke about: Sir Patrick Moore, astronomer and broadcaster, dies aged 89; Ups and Downs of Making Elevators Go; Mathematical sciences research: leading the way to UK economic growth; What’s…
Help a dude write an open-source calculus textbook (or use one of the many great ones already available)
A chap called Dixon Crews has posted to reddit’s maths section asking for help with a writing project.
Videos from MathsJam 2012
While we were at the big MathsJam conference a few weekends ago, we took the opportunity to point a camera in people’s faces and ask them to tell us something interesting. Because of the high quality of MathsJam attendees, this went better than it would in most other contexts. Here’s a collection of clips we…