Better late than never, here’s the 88th Carnival of Mathematics. As an editor of The Aperiodical, I’ve been press-ganged into interrupting my holiday to write this month’s edition. Before I start with the real submissions, I think I’ll abuse this bully pulpit to link to some of my recent blogging efforts. I found each letter’s…
Turing debate in Parliament
Last Thursday a debate about the Turing pardon took place in Parliament. The MKNews website carries a report on the debate, which seems to be a rehashing of Turing’s value and the case for a pardon, including the recent suggestion of extending the new Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 to posthumous cases. The report also…
Leap Second 30 June 2012
In case you missed it, here is the leap second moment. I loaded several web and desktop clock displays. Notice how many of them didn’t take account of the extra second – but some did! For more details on what this means, see the post ‘Hang on a second‘. [youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbRtco6IryQ]
Math/Maths 103: In which every equation halves the listenership
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 about: malarial transmission; signal processing algorithm to test voice for Parkinson’s disease; baseball run modelling; heavy use of equations impedes communication among biologists; city complexity; gang territorial boundaries;…
Hang on a second
Owing to an incredibly small discrepancy between the atomic clock length of a year and the time it takes for the sun to orbit the earth, and the dogged insistence of scientists for being as close as possible to correct all the time, tomorrow is the most recent in a series of days where time…
π vs τ: FOTSN/Tau Day special
Since it’s $\tau$ Day, we thought we’d give Festival of the Spoken Nerd constant-fans Matt Parker and Steve Mould a chance to air their respective viewpoints in the $\tau$ vs $\pi$ debate. It’s a maths showdown!
Etienne Ghys, 2012 LMS Hardy Lecturer
It was a couple of weeks ago now that I saw Étienne Ghys deliver a lecture titled On cutting cloth, according to Chebyshev at Newcastle University, as part of his lecture tour as Hardy Fellow for 2012. I had no idea what the talk was about and only a faint idea of who Prof Ghys was…