According to an article behind the Times paywall which I haven’t read, an “urgent review is under way into the reliability of some of the Government’s most crucial calculations in the wake of the West Coast Main Line shambles“. The part of the article above the paywall reports that checks for ensuring the accuracy of…
Foreign Office gives Bletchley Park £480,000 and announces GCHQ apprenticeships
Having neglected the home of wartime codebreaking since it packed up and left with the end of hostilities, it looks like the Foreign Office is Turing over a new leaf – Foreign Secretary William Hague paid a visit to Bletchley Park on Thursday to make a couple of announcements that will please both amateur and more…
Women in Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
At the Royal Society this week, they’ve celebrated Ada Lovelace Day with an Edit-A-Thon of everyone’s favourite The Free Encyclopedia. A group gathered yesterday to hack away at some of Wikipedia’s most neglected entries – those covering famous females. Partly due to the under-representation of women in editing, such articles can be under-developed and/or have…
Who wants to host a Celebration of Mind? There’s still time
This Sunday, 21st October 2012, marks what would have been the 98th birthday of Martin Gardner, American man of letters and numbers, as well as logic, puzzles, magic and scepticism. I had the good fortune to know Martin in the last decade of his life, and a more gentle and modest man you could not find,…
Nobel prize for economics awarded to a mathematician
There may be no Nobel in mathematics, but that needn’t stop mathematicians winning one: Lloyd Shapley has just won the Nobel prize for economics, for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. ((Though technically it’s not a Nobel prize, and actually the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of…
Advances in pure nonsense
Congratulations to Professor Marcie Rathke of the University of Southern Northern Dakota, whose paper, Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE has been accepted for publication by the journal Advances in Pure Mathematics. Here’s a snippet: Actually, uncongratulations to Prof Rathke, who doesn’t exist, and congratulations instead to Nate Eldredge…
Cushing blogs
I’m going to abuse this here soapbox I have constructed to do a friend a favour. Here’s the friend, exhibiting typical behaviour: I’ve mentioned my good friend David Cushing a few times here. I once even managed to record him doing a pretty clever card trick. He sits next to me in our office at…