A paper published in the January 2010 issue of Computers & Mathematics with Applications which, according to Times Higher Education, “used unspecified computer ‘magnification technology’ to provide the first proof of a Euclidean axiom called the ‘parallel postulate’”, has been withdrawn by the publisher.
Curved Crease Sculptures by Erik and Martin Demaine
Curved Crease Sculptures by Erik and Martin Demaine: The shapes remind me of the Danse Serpentine.
MAA Mathematical Petting Zoo
The MAA recently displayed a mathematical petting zoo at the USA Science & Engineering Festival, along with a slideshow of pictures from their MAA Found Math collection. The page about the event doesn’t have any pictures on it but it does have lots of links to the artists and their portfolios. The usual suspects are represented…
Follow the timeline of Alan Turing’s life
The Science Museum in London have created a Facebook timeline of Alan Turing’s life and events afterwards. It’s an excellent use of the new Timeline feature – you can scroll up and down the timeline from Turing’s birth to the current day, which contains plenty on his codebreaking and work with early computers as well…
Some infinities (and egos) are bigger than others
Here’s a tale of a rational (or irrational?) legal battle from the 1990s re: Cantor’s diagonal argument. Cantor’s diagonal argument from 1891 was truly revolutionary: an ingenious way to demonstrate that no matter what proposed list of all real numbers (or, say, just those between $0$ and $1$) is put forth, it’s easy to find…
Carnival of Mathematics 86
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of April, is now online at The Math Less Travelled. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. For more information about the Carnival of Mathematics, click here.
The number line is not an intuitive concept
Some cognitive scientists have done an experiment on some people in Papua New Guinea to test the hypothesis that the number line is based on an in-built intuition that all humans share. They concluded that it isn’t, and that you can use cardinal numbers without placing them mentally on a line.