This month’s MathsJam was well attended – we matched last month’s turnout of 11, albeit one of that number was in the form of Ed Bradshaw, the organiser of the Washington DC MathsJam. For Ed, it was 4pm and he was in his office, using Google Plus for a live video connection to a MathsJam…
Put Alan Turing on bitcoins
Following the recent trend for Alan Turing petitions to be filed with the UK Government e-petitions website, and in particular the current Turing bank note petition, a new petition shows a satirical twist: Alan Turing is a national hero. His contribution to computer science, and hence to the life of the nation and the world,…
Math/Maths 90: Maths is to Mathematics as Math is 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: Endre Szemerédi wins the Abel Prize 2012; Automatically tagging the World Service archive; Intel Science Fair; 72nd Putnam; The Spanish link in cracking the Enigma code; Greater…
2012 Abel Prize awarded to Endre Szemerédi
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has decided to award the Abel Prize for 2012 to Endre Szemerédi (Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, and Department of Computer Science, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA) “for his fundamental contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, and in…
BBC R&D automatic tagging of speech audio using vector spaces
A post on the BBC Research & Development Blog outlines work on automatic tagging of speech audio. The work is concerned with the World Service archive, which apparently has “very sparse” associated programme data. The archive “covers many decades and consists of about two and a half years of high-quality continuous audio content”. The aim…
Behind closed doors: the Spanish intelligence service
When I was a student there was a door in the basement of the university library marked “This door must remained closed at all times”. I remember joking that perhaps no one could remember what was behind it, and of course they couldn’t check. The BBC are reporting that GCHQ have received two Engima machines…
Investigative journalist attempts to test whether GCSE maths is ‘dumbed down’
Barnie Choudhury, principal lecturer at the University of Lincoln’s school of journalism with a background in investigative journalist, is taking the GCSE examinations in an attempt to “test whether or not the allegations made in recent years that exams had been ‘dumbed down’ were true”. An article in the Lincolnshire Echo says: He sat his O-level…