Anyone who’s a fan of data and bigness will be pleased to hear that 22-28 April is going to be Big Data Week. This ‘global festival of data’ will take place in participating cities all over the world, including London, Sydney, Barcelona, Shanghai, Amsterdam, Chicago and Utrecht (we only have a MathsJam in one of…
Principia Mathematica – THE MUSICAL
Principia Mathematica is Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s epic maths text which outlines the foundations of mathematics and logic, famously proves that 1+1=2 in 200 pages, and took so much re-writing it nearly sent them both mad in the process. It was also a hugely significant work, attempting to describe a set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic from…
Foldable Dodecahedron Calendar made in LaTeX
If anyone still hasn’t sorted themselves out with a calendar for 2013 – come on people, it’s February! – there’s a nice example of one here. It’s a dodecahedron which, once assembled, you can presumably orient to display the correct month (or the incorrect month, if you’re an impish sort). The best thing about it…
Crimewaves really are waves – but they can be stopped
Nothing puts your home insurance premium up like having been burgled in the past – because it means you’re more likely to be burgled again. Stanford researcher Nancy Rodríguez, with colleagues Henri Berestycki (who is first author, for the record) and Lenya Ryzhik, has developed a travelling waves model to explain this phenomenon – and,…
Formula for BMI has an ‘ill-founded definition’
Have you ever calculated your BMI and been given a reading of ‘overweight’, when you clearly aren’t? Or maybe you’ve been training hard in the gym but your BMI has increased? Many of us, including GPs and fitness instructors, use BMI as an indicator of whether we are ‘fit and healthy’ and reliably use it…
Aperiodcast – 11/02/2013
Two days late, because that is the way we rotate here, it’s another episode of our sporadic navel-gazing podcast. In this episode we talked about: Our piece on the Invariant Subspace Problem (and the more recent news) Log-log! Who’s there? Not a power law! Our coverage of the new Mersenne Prime news, and our meta-coverage of everyone…
Collaborative Mathematics: kids (and non-kids) work together on problems over YouTube
Jason Ermer’s Collaborative Mathematics project has launched its first video challenge. The project aims to allow mathematics to happen collaboratively via the medium of online videos, and video responses. The idea is that having watched the challenge video, you work with a group of friends (collaboratively) and post a response video, and then watch others’ response…