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…
Your help needed: survey of international mathematical cultures
Dr Aiping Xu of Coventry University is asking staff who have experience of mathematics education in the UK and other countries to complete a short questionnaire as part of a survey of international mathematical cultures for the Higher Education Academy. The questionnaire explains the purpose of the study. A growing number of international students study…
Talk: Computability of Bass-Serre structures in the Grzegorczyk hierarchy
I’m going to abuse this here organ of mine ((phrasing?!?!)) to show off a thing I did yesterday. My chum the inimitable David Cushing has started a postgrad pure maths seminar at Newcastle. Because there are only a few pure postgrads here, he asked me to give a talk about the stuff I was looking at for…
‘Of little practical value’?
Paul Taylor has taken the opportunity to see what we can learn about the British press’s attitude and ability when it comes to the reporting of big numbers ending in a 1.
GCSE switch-off is off
The BBC are reporting that plans to change key subjects, including mathematics, from the current GCSE assessment system to a new, tougher ‘English Baccalaureate Certificate’ and to have a single exam board for each subject are “to be abandoned”. Further information: Planned switch from GCSEs to Baccalaureate in England ‘abandoned’ at BBC News. via @RosalindMist on Twitter.
Chrome no longer supports MathML
Recently we reported that Chrome has added support for MathML, a good method for representing maths on the web. Now a comment on a discussion about enabling MathML in Chromium, the open source web browser project from which Google Chrome draws its source code, has announced that this feature will be turned off, for now. The…
More experimental evidence for the infinitude of the primes
In a classic example of the intersection between maths and news, there’s been a new Mersenne prime discovered! Mersenne primes are numbers of the form $2^p – 1$, where $p$ is a prime number. They’re highly valued as a source of large prime numbers, since testing the primality of a (suspected) prime of this form…