Have a look at this trailer for a new film about maths:
More and Less
I’m currently reading The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, presenter of Radio 4 maths show More or Less. It’s very good, but one thing is stopping me from giving it an unqualified recommendation: it’s full of passages like this: [T]he government spends three hundred dollars per person (five times less than the British government and…
Puzzlebomb – July 2012
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 7 of Puzzlebomb, for July 2012, can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 7 – July 2012 The solutions to Issue 7 can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 7 – July 2012 – Solutions Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
Math/Maths 104: Never mind Higgs; exact value discovered for pi
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: Make Britain Count open letter to Michael Gove (but do they know their four times table?); Higgs boson-like particle discovery claimed at LHC (or, perhaps, Confirmed: the…
Telegraph’s open letter to Michael Gove and Vince Cable on numeracy (presented with arithmetic errors)
The Telegraph have printed an open letter to Michael Gove and Vince Cable summarising its six month numeracy campaign, Make Britain Count. This says that the campaign has “highlighted the crisis we face as a nation in maths education” and call on the Secretaries of State to commit resources, adjust policy and campaign to address…
Lotka–Volterra competition models applied to LA street gang territories
A mathematical model previously used to determine the hunting range of animals in the wild, namely the ‘formal spatial Lotka–Volterra competition model’, apparently holds promise for mapping the territories of street gangs. Lead author P. Jeffrey Brantingham is quoted in a press release saying: “The way gangs break up their neighborhoods into unique territories is…
Dance Your PhD: Cutting Sequences on the Double Pentagon
As a mathematician (and not just any kind of mathematician – a PURE mathematician), I heard of the “Dance Your PhD” contest and immediately burst out laughing. As much as there is some nice pure mathematical dancing out there (see, for instance, this series of videos of different numerical sorting algorithms interpreted through dance), the idea that…