Last week we reported that the UK Government have released a draft primary school Programme of Study for mathematics for consultation. A report from the Telegraph quoted in that article mentioned that “the use and multiplication of fractions” was “a vital precursor to studying algebra”. A piece of research published in the journal Psychological Science,…
Instant MathJax preview of LaTeX typed into HTML textareas
I’ve completely rewritten my write maths, see maths library to be a little jQuery plugin that attaches itself to editable areas on pages, like contenteditable elements, textareas, and input boxes. When your cursor is inside some LaTeX, a little preview box appears just above it with the LaTeX rendered through MathJax. I’ve made a demo page…
Math/Maths 101: Ian Stewart Live from the Cheltenham Festival
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 were joined live from the Cheltenham Science Festival by surprise (to everyone involved) special guest Ian Stewart who chatted about the mathematics behind board game strategy, mathematical thinking through…
A possible contender to the Duckworth-Lewis method
Readers may be aware of the Duckworth/Lewis method for deciding how many runs the second team should score in a game of cricket foreshortened by rain, in order to beat the first team; a triumph of communicating complex mathematical ideas to a lay audience, described in an article by Frank Duckworth. Duckworth describes some of the…
Mirror which could eliminate drivers’ blind spot receives US patent
A problem in optics has lead to a US patent for a car side mirror which “eliminates the dangerous ‘blind spot’” and “dramatically increases the field of view with minimal distortion” by finding approximate solutions for “the problem of controlling a single ray bundle with a single reflector”.
The Turing Solution: radio documentary
The Turing Solution, a BBC Radio 4 documentary presented by Matt Parker covering “mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing, and his role in the invention of the computer”, was broadcast last week and is currently available on BBC iPlayer. A quick (28 min) biography covering various aspects of his life and work (particularly including his mathematics…
Sir Tim Gowers
The latest Queen’s Birthday Honours list has been released. The list includes, under “Knights Bachelor – Knighthoods”, “Professor William Timothy Gowers, FRS, Royal Society Research Professor, Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge” for “services to Mathematics” and, under “Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE)”, “Mrs Manju Tank, Maths…