Do you remember when I told you why I supported Relatively Prime and you should too? I said: Samuel is an enthusiastic communicator of mathematics and has the technical skills to make an excellent producer of content. You may have enjoyed what he does as my co-host on the Math/Maths Podcast, or his interview show…
Relatively Prime, All in a Name
“Prime. Prime? Prime! Prime factors, twin primes, pseudo-primes? No, no no. Relatively Prime? Yes, Relatively Prime.” I have a problem, no matter how good an idea I have I can not start to work on it until I have a name. Some names are easy, Combination and Permutations was a name well before I ever…
IMA Mathematics 2013 Conference
The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications’s flagship general mathematical interest conference, ‘Mathematics’, is getting ready for its eighth outing in 2013. Mathematics 2013 focuses on the Mathematics of Planet Earth, an international collaboration, including talks on climate, education, energy and demography. The website expresses a hope that the audience will have mathematicians, those who…
To teach, must I principally research?
A couple of weeks ago at the HE STEM Conference I saw a keynote lecture by Sir Alan Langlands, Chief Executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England. During a questions session following this, I was surprised to be handed the microphone but apparently I had raised my hand. I asked a question. Quite…
Math/Maths 112: Matt Parker’s Domino Computer
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released. A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. This week Samuel and Peter spoke to Matt Parker about the inner workings of his Domino Computer for the Manchester Science Festival; and they spoke to each other about: The claimed proof of the…
Steven Strogatz series on “what math can reveal about us and our world”
Steven Strogatz has begun a six-part series in a New York Times blog. ‘Me, Myself and Math’ apparently “looks at us through the lens of math”. Steven explains that this will focus on how the subject I love — math — relates to the subject we all love — ourselves. From the DNA that encodes…
AU defined as 149,597,870,700 metres
The astronomical unit (AU), which Nature News calls “the rough distance from the Earth to the Sun” and Wikipedia refers to as “the average distance between the Earth and the Sun (roughly speaking)”, has been defined as fixed at 149,597,870,700 metres. This standard was adopted by unanimous vote at the International Astronomical Union’s meeting in…