-or- How I Unofficially Broke The World Record That Never Was In April, a gentleman called B. Sai Kiran became, briefly, internet-famous for doing arithmetic. In Hyderabad, he subtracted a 70-digit number from another in the barest smidgen over a minute – 60.05 seconds, at the second attempt.
Out-of-work economists will probably not turn to bank robbery
Three economists decided to examine bank robbery as an economic activity. They were given access to data from the British Bankers’ Association on the amounts stolen during robberies, pretended to be statisticians for a bit, and came up with some interesting results. They’ve written up their findings in a feature article in the June edition…
Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education Conference 2012
The Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education Conference 2012 will take place on 10 July 2012 at the Royal Society in London.
Draft UK primary mathematics changes for consultation
The UK Government have released a draft primary school Programme of Study for mathematics for consultation. The announcement was much covered in the press, which focused on the ‘back to basics’ approach. The Daily Mail reported that “times tables are to be put back at the heart of the curriculum for children’s first years at…
Redrawing the map of Great Britain from a network of human interactions
This is just about the most right-on, 21st-century paper and associated PR I’ve seen this year. MIT’s SENSEable City Lab has produced this little video to go with a paper by some of their researchers, led by Carlo Ratti: [youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-hlP8Ql384] So we have a slickly produced YouTube video announcing an open-access paper about big…
One half of one percent of your time
If I gave you 200 tokens representing your available time this week, would you spend one of them on listening to the Math/Maths Podcast? John Read tweeted, on the occasion of our 100th episode/2nd birthday of Math/Maths, that: to hear all 100 of them within 2 years ≈ 0.6% of the time listening.– @johndavidread on…
“Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks” – 10 years on
ScienceWatch has published an interview with Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz on the decennial of the publication of their paper “Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks”, which contained some counter-intuitive results about the spread of disease and sparked the development of network theory. The interview covers what they did, what it means and what they hope…