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…
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…
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…
x It’s an unpresupposing little letter, $x$. In fact, that’s the reason we use it to represent something we don’t know. But how do you write it down? When Vijay Krishnan tweeted a link to an American college professor’s page on mathematical handwriting, I was shocked to learn that he thought adding a hook 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. This week Samuel and Peter spoke about: Bill Thurston (1946-2012); Jerry Nelson (1934-2012); Neil Armstrong (1930-2012); A mathematician goes to the beach; solid state quantum computer; Searching for Grigori Perelman; A-level and GCSE results;…
Researchers have designed and fabricated a quantum processor capable of factoring a composite number – 15 – into its constituent prime factors, 3 and 5. According to a press release, this “represents a milestone on the road map to building a quantum computer capable of factoring much larger numbers, with significant implications for cryptography and…
An IMA/LMS press release points out that A-level and AS-level Mathematics and Further Mathematics entries are continuing to rise. The number of A-level Mathematics entries is up 3.3% on last year, with AS Mathematics increasing by 5.1%. Further Mathematics also continues to grow, with entries increasing by 7.6% at A-level this year and 12.9% at…