According to a report by the University of London’s Institute of Education, the very best 10-year-old English students are as good at maths as their counterparts around the world, but have fallen behind by around two years by the time they reach their GCSEs. Cue frothy-mouthed calls for more rigour and tougher exams, presumably since…
LMS 150 Year Impact Assessment
The London Mathematical Society will be 150 years old in a couple of years, and we mathematicians always bang on about how maths takes a long time to have impact in the wider world, so they’re asking for examples of maths done in the last 150 years that’s had an impact outside academia. Read more…
Competition to visualise open government data
Who loves data? If we’re talking about the android from Star Trek: TNG, then I do, and if we’re talking about the thing that’s not the plural of anecdotes, then I’m pretty sure the answer is everyone. If you love data, then you’ll definitely love visualising data, and Google have teamed up with the Open…
Not mentioned on The Aperiodical last week – Un-un-free research, MOOCs and cash for arty maths
Yikes! Even with our hard-working new team of News Team news teamsters chopping away at it admirably, our news queue has grown faster than we can deal with. That means it’s time for another bullet list of news! The first edition of the IMA’s new journal Information and Inference (announced previously) came out last December, and everything’s…
Applied game theory: Students boycott exam and all get an A
A piece on the New York Times Economix blog casts a story from Inside Higher Ed as a piece of applied game theory. Professor Peter Fröhlich of Johns Hopkins University has a grading system in which each class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if…
Like in a Dream, by Jérémie Brunet
[youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S530Vwa33G0] A mesmerising tour through fractal space. Switch to fullscreen HD if you can. Created with Mandelbulb3D via Steven Wittens on Google+
The New Mathblogging.org
A couple of weeks ago, our chums slash competitors ((Not really, they’re just chums.)) at mathblogging.org relaunched their website. They’re now using the much fancier ScienceSeeker.org software and it looks really good.