Today is Halloween, the day when skeletons and spooks and statisticians ((While The Aperiodical is an equal opportunity employer, the author maintains a legitimate fear of “approximate counting”)) roam the earth to wreak their awful revenge on the innocent. Maths has a habit of borrowing peculiar words from the vernacular, so I thought I’d go…
You’ll probably want to listen to this programme presented by Alex Bellos. Alex Bellos visits Japan, on a quest to discover why Asian cultures seem so much better at maths and numbers than many western countries. He looks at the cultural difference in the Japanese approach to numbers and asks whether there is something fundamental…
Last Sunday saw the anniversary of the birth of Martin Gardner, and as a celebration, the Gathering for Gardner people planned a world-wide party ‘G4G Celebration of Mind‘. It happened to be Maths Jam night on Tuesday, so we put the Nottingham Maths Jam on the G4G-COM map. Then on Friday three of us had…
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 couldn’t speak but Peter spoke to Matt Parker and Katie Steckles about the Domputer, an attempt to build a computer from 10,000 dominoes at the Manchester Science Festival. Get…
A new ((Relatively new, they were launched in March.)) charity called National Numeracy has launched a campaign to produce a positive transformation of public attitudes to numeracy and mathematics in the UK, to create an “I can do maths” approach and to raise the numeracy skills of at least 500,000 adults of working age to…
Plus Magazine tweeted to say that they’re showing the Travelling Salesman Movie chez eux in November. Tickets £7.50, 6.30pm on the 20th of November. I thought we’d posted about the movie before but a search of the archives turned up nothing, so here’s the trailer: [youtube url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybd5rbQ5rU] If that looks like your cup of tea (or…
The petition to put Alan Turing on the next £10 note has received over 22,000 signatures, which triggered a response from the Government: The Bank of England has been including historic characters on its notes since 1970. The Bank welcomes suggestions from members of the public for individuals who might feature on future banknotes, and…