You may be aware of Kryptos, the sculpture covered in enciphered text and located outside CIA headquarters (and so not accessible to the general public). Three of the four messages on the sculpture have been decrypted, but the fourth remained obscured. Now the Telegraph reports that the sculptor, Jim Sanborn, who is apparently surprised that…
Maths and Paralympic Sport in Plus magazine
Apparently there’s a parallel Olympics taking place in series with the Olympics in London. Having done such an excellent job so far this summer, the Millennium Mathematics Project is continuing its coverage from a mathematical angle, with the Plus Paralympic calendar and the special project Maths and Sport: Countdown to the Games. For example, John…
A trailer for Keith Devlin’s Intro to Mathematical Thinking MOOC
Keith Devlin has recorded a 3-minute video advertising his Introduction to Mathematical Thinking MOOC on Coursera. In this, Keith explains the aims of the course, which includes elements seen previously on his MOOC Talk blog, and discusses the structure of the course and a little about the MOOC concept. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFs06zgBfMI According to a tweet from…
The Mathalicious weekly video series has launched
You may remember Math52, a Kickstarter project from Mathalicious which reached its goal in June. This promised, “every week for a year we’ll create a short video exploring a unique application of math in everyday life”. Now the Mathalicious video series has launched with two videos, both less than two minutes in length, available via…
Prismatoy: a parallelepiped you can hold
Applied mathematicians love parallelepipeds. The one I share my office with is always drawing them, and banging on about how great they are. Well, I think I know just what to get him for Christmas. Hopson Kinetic has, for reasons only they can know, made a plastic parallelepiped toy called Prismatoy. It’s constructed from “72 individual…
Using Computer Modern on the web
Computer Modern is the family of typefaces developed by Donald Knuth for TeX. It’s so good-looking that some scientists do research just so they can write it up in Computer Modern. I love TeX and everybody knows it, so I was pretty delighted to hear that the cm-unicode project compiles versions of the Computer Modern fonts in a…
Manchester MathsJam Recap, August 2012
This month was a small group, but MathsJam is serious business so we got through loads of fun in the time allotted for fun. To start with, we hacked away at Leeds’ tweeted starter for ten: LDS : As I am alone, starting w/ simple one ; don’t know the answer yet.Is it possible to…