MathsJam this month fell on the day before my birthday, which meant not only was our ‘Jam well supplied with birthday cake, but there was a jubilant mood only aided by the presence of some puzzles I’d written for my birthday party. Everyone had a good crack at the maths-related one, and found it entertaining…
As part of Puzzlebomb’s commitment to bringing you all puzzles, all the time, we present a special one-off edition, containing a mildly topical cryptic crossword compiled by one of our regular puzzle setters. Enjoy! Solutions will be posted in roughly a month from now. Puzzlebomb – Specials 1
[vimeo url=https://vimeo.com/39648092] Rhombus System by The Fundamental Group. via NotCot.org
Today is Euler’s $-306 \times e^{i \pi}$th birthday, and Google have chosen to celebrate (despite ignoring several other prominent mathematical birthdays, including Erdős’s centenary – see the @MathsHistory twitter feed for a full list) by creating a Google doodle on their homepage. For anyone who isn’t aware, this is when Google changes the image above…
Timothy Gowers’ mathematical writing experiment, which we reported on last month, has now concluded and the results are available. The experiment concerned a set of proofs of results on metric spaces; Gowers sought opinions on how well-written and understandable each one is. It turns out that experiment was a ruse!: Gowers revealed on his blog…
Here’s a round up of some other recent (and now less so) news stories we didn’t cover in full. 13 New 3-body orbits discovered Physicists from the University of Belgrade have discovered numerically 13 new solutions to the 3-body problem, in 2 dimensions. Described as “quite a feat in mathematical physics”, the discovery makes progress…
The London Mathematical Society Popular Lectures for 2013 have been announced. Professor Ray Hill, University of Salford, will talk about ‘Mathematics in the Courtroom’, and Dr. Vicky Neale, University of Cambridge, will give a lecture on ‘Addictive Number Theory’.