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.
‘Of little practical value’?
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…
The invariant subspace problem is still a problem
Recently we reported that Eva Gallarda and Carl Cowen had announced they had a proof of the invariant subspace conjecture for Hilbert spaces. Well, yesterday they announced at the blog Café Matemático that there was a problem with their proof:
Carnival of Mathematics 95
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of November, is now online at Maths Fact. The post is in Spanish, but can be translated into English using Google Translate. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. For…
International Year of Statistics Video Contest
In case you’d already forgotten, 2013 is the International Year of Statistics (I had; turns out Katie told us about it just after the New Year). One of the many activities going on is a video contest sponsored by the publishers Wiley. Take it away, Wiley! We invite videos of four minutes in length or…