The Birthday Honours 2013 have been announced, and an extensive list has been posted on Wikipedia. The big name is Andrew Dilnot, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority and inaugural presenter of More or Less, who is knighted “for services to Economics and Economic Policy”. Apart from this, the list on Wikipedia contains one other…
Interesting Esoterica Summation, volume 7
Do you ever collect too much fun maths stuff to keep to yourself, and then start a website just so you’ve got somewhere to put it? That happens to me sometimes. In case you’re new to this: every now and then I encounter a paper or a book or an article that grabs my interest but…
Cushing your luck: properties of randomly chosen numbers
Long-time Aperiodical muse David Cushing has made a bet with us that he can give us an interesting post every Friday for the next ten weeks. Every week that he sends a post, we buy him a bar of chocolate. Every week that he doesn’t send us a post, he buys us a bar of…
Scrooge McDuck in Mathmagic land
A sympathetic story for you this Saturday. Andy has a problem. He can’t solve it on his own – he needs your help. This problem vexed Andy so much that he spent four years trying to solve it on his own, to no avail. It really is a very difficult problem. Finally in 1997, out…
Bound on prime gaps bound decreasing by leaps and bounds
Update 17/06/2013: The gap is down to 60,744. That’s a whole order of magnitude down from where it started! When Yitang Zhang unexpectedly announced a proof that that there are infinitely many pairs of primes less than 70 million apart from each other – a step on the way to the twin primes conjecture – certain internet…
What colour shirt do mathematicians wear?
Readers of The Aperiodical may recall three excellent posts on the Maths of Star Trek by Jim ‘But Not As We Know It’ Grime. At the same time, Jim discussed the topic in glorious audio with Andy Holding and Will Thompson, hosts of the Science of Fiction podcast (worth listening to, but at least visit…
Integer Sequence Review: A052486
The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences contains over 200,000 sequences. It contains classics, curios, thousands of derivatives entered purely for completeness’s sake, short sequences whose completion would be a huge mathematical achievement, and some entries which are just downright silly. For a lark, David and I have decided to review some of the Encyclopedia’s sequences.…