Fresh from success with their maths/comedy tour Your Days Are Numbered: The Mathematics of Death, stand-up mathematician Matt Parker and comic/writer Timandra Harkness have put together a new maths-based comedy show, and this time instead of statistics getting the comedy treatment, it’s engineering. The show, titled ‘Humans v Nature: Engineering FTW’ looks at all the…
Marcus du Sautoy will be involved in three events at Hay Festival the weekend after next, including a talk titled Maths on Stage: The Dramatic Life of Numbers, about “his experiences working with theatre company Complicité on A Disappearing Number and his explorations of bringing maths to the stage in a recent collaboration with actress Victoria…
The table never lies, or so they say. So when Manchester City were crowned Premier League Champions last week everyone seemed to agree that they were the best team in the league. As Roberto Mancini said, they had scored more than United and conceded less and beaten them twice in the league. Although United finished…
Alex Bellos, author of Alex’s Adventures in Numberland / Here’s Looking at Euclid, has started another survey about numbers, following his survey to find the world’s favourite number. This time round, he wants “random” numbers. Answering the survey is very easy: just go to randomnumberservey.net and type a number in the box. Alex says he hopes to…
The first take-home lesson of this note is that you too can be unique. You’ll have to keep shuffling to get there, but it is an attainable goal. Several years ago it dawned on me that the number of possible ways to order or permute the cards in a standard deck of size $52$ was…
The Daily Mail reports that a “schoolboy ‘genius’” has solved “puzzles” “posed by” Issac Newton that have “baffled mathematicians for 350 years”. There are many nonsense warning signs but also hints that something interesting is going on.
Festival Of The Spoken Nerd, the “comedy night for the insatiably sci-curious” hosted by Helen Arney, Matt Parker and Steve Mould, is going on tour.