Marcus du Sautoy has lent his weight to The Telegraph’s numeracy campaign, Make Britain Count. In an interview covering maths and music, patterns and abstraction and a little about his and his children’s mathematics education, he also talks about how maths teaching in schools could be improved, stating that in this country there’s an honour…
Tony Mann on Atiyah and Villani at Tate Modern
Tony Mann attended the Atiyah/Villani(/Stewart) event at Tate Modern yesterday and wrote a review of this for his blog. He discusses several interesting ideas from the discussions – “a few that resonated with me” – including on problem solving, history and the practice of doing mathematics in relation to art, barriers and the place of…
Internet Problem Solving Contest
The Internet Problem Solving Contest has just started. The Internet Problem Solving Contest (IPSC) is an online contest for teams consisting of up to three people. Several problems will be published at the beginning of the competition. Each problem consists of a problem description and two input data sets. To solve a problem you will…
More maths at Hay Festival
After plugging Marcus du Sautoy’s appearances at Hay Festival, it occurred to me that it would only be fair to mention the other mathematically-interesting events of the week.
Markov Chains avoid buses arriving in threes
The CNN reports on research which uses a Markov Chain model to avoid buses bunching, a phenomenon that’s a cliché of observational comedy and “happens when buses are thrown off schedule because of traffic, weather or too many passengers at one stop”.
EPSRC very quietly relents on maths funding
The EPSRC has silently updated its table of “areas in which fellowships are available” to include “intradisciplinary research” in mathematical sciences at all career stages. According to a post by Timothy Gowers on Google+, this “means in practice pretty much all of maths.”
Puzzlebomb – June 2012
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 6 of Puzzlebomb, for June 2012, can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 6 – June 2012 The solutions to Issue 6 can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 6 – June 2012 – Solutions Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.