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 to Matt Parker about the inner workings of his Domino Computer for the Manchester Science Festival; and they spoke to each other about: The claimed proof of the…
Steven Strogatz series on “what math can reveal about us and our world”
Steven Strogatz has begun a six-part series in a New York Times blog. ‘Me, Myself and Math’ apparently “looks at us through the lens of math”. Steven explains that this will focus on how the subject I love — math — relates to the subject we all love — ourselves. From the DNA that encodes…
AU defined as 149,597,870,700 metres
The astronomical unit (AU), which Nature News calls “the rough distance from the Earth to the Sun” and Wikipedia refers to as “the average distance between the Earth and the Sun (roughly speaking)”, has been defined as fixed at 149,597,870,700 metres. This standard was adopted by unanimous vote at the International Astronomical Union’s meeting in…
Mathblogging.org ‘Mathematical Instruments’: interviews with mathematical bloggers
The Mathblogging.org blog has a new series of posts, ‘Mathematical Instruments’, highlighting mathematical bloggers. The posts take the form of an interview in which the subject answers questions about their blog and blogging in general. The first post explains that this will let bloggers tell you a little bit about themselves. We call it “Mathematical…
Higgs boson discovery passes peer review
The discovery of the Higgs boson, which “completes the standard model [of particle physics]” according to New Scientist, has passed peer review. Two papers, from the two experiments which each contributed to the discovery, have been published in Volume 716, Issue 1 (17 September 2012) of Physics Letters B, the same journal as Peter Higgs’ original…
Carnival of Mathematics 90
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of August, is now online at Walking Randomly. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. For more information about the Carnival of Mathematics, click here.
#MTT2K: Teachers critique Khan Academy
Pretty much everyone has an opinion about learning, and the teaching that causes, impedes or just precedes it. Sal Khan famously just started making videos with the aim of helping people learn, without paying much attention to the hows and whys of pedagogy. That means that pretty much everyone has an opinion about Sal’s site,…