Yet another fun toy for you. Give a computer a set of tiles defined by what their edges look like, can you fit them together? That problem is undecidable, since you can encode Turing machines as sets of tiles, but it turns out it’s fun to watch a computer try. Ghost Diagrams asks you for…
Recognising a good idea when he sees one, William Stein has put the source code to his Springer-published undergraduate textbook Elementary Number Theory: Primes, Congruences, and Secrets: A Computational Approach on GitHub. The book introduces classical elementary number theory and elliptic curves, with lots of Sage code to encourage you to play around with the structures…
This is a fun game to while away the midweek blues. You’re presented with two dots. You can drag between dots to create lines and circles, as if you had a straightedge and compass. Apart from a few challenges to get you thinking, that’s pretty much it! The game was created by Nico Disseldorp, who…
Math Overflow, where intimidatingly clever mathematicians ask and answer research-relevant questions, has just been upgraded to version 2.0 of the Stack Exchange software which has powered the site since it opened in 2009. This is news because Math Overflow has merged with the commercial Stack Exchange network, losing its (semi-)independent status. There was a tiny…
After taking a couple of weeks off from reviewing integer sequences, we’ve decided to shake up the format. Prepare yourself for… We’re going to review six sequences each week for four weeks, picking a winner from each. Then, we’ll pick one sequence from the ones we’ve already reviewed individually, plus a wildcard. Finally, a single…
Pretty big book news (in a couple of ways)! The Univalent Foundations Program at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton has released a 470-page textbook resetting the foundations of mathematics on homotopy type theory. It’s called Homotopy Type Theory: Univalent Foundations of Mathematics.
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…