PRIMES, it turns out, isn’t just a word for numbers without any proper factors – it’s also a mentoring programme for high school students in the USA, based at MIT. The students visit there once a week from February to May, and work with academics on real research. They also run similar programmes for computer…
Henry Segerman is a mathematician at the University of Melbourne with a keen interest in 3d-printing mathematical shapes. He’s just uploaded a video showing off his latest creation, a 30-cell burr puzzle created in collaboration with Saul Schleimer: [youtube url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJwqT_sbB_A] Pretty cool, eh? As well as providing a PDF describing the puzzle, Henry’s uploaded the…
On the 18th of October BBC Four is going to broadcast a programme called Tails You Win: The Science of Chance, presented by Prof David Spiegelhalter, as part of its Big Science series. Here’s the BBC’s description: Smart and witty, jam-packed with augmented-reality graphics and fascinating history, this film, presented by Professor David Spiegelhalter, tries to…
Here’s a little catch-up with the status of the claimed proofs of some big statements that were announced recently. At the end of August, Shin Mochizuki released what he claims is a proof of the abc conjecture (link goes to a PDF). Barring someone spotting a huge error, it’s going to take a long time to…
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released. A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. Peter battles freshers’ flu and Samuel tries to resist boasting about Relatively Prime long enough to talk about: Proofs for the Goldbach conjecture and the Riemann hypothesis?: Possible Problem with ABC proof; What happened…
I am to Chair the next Institute of Mathematics and its Applications Early Career Mathematicians’ Conference, on Saturday 24 November 2012 at the University of Greenwich. As this gets closer I am getting pretty excited to be running this and I am proud of what we have arranged. I have just posted the schedule for…
In case you weren’t already excited enough about Matt Parker’s Domino Computer (see: Math/Maths Episode 112, and articles on this website), the Manchester Science Festival blog has posted an official press release about the event, including photos of the domino assembly team lying around on the floor (none of us are professional models, but we did…