According to this paper, published this week in Science, and described in this article from Psychology Today, the answer you give to the following simple maths question is a predictor of whether or not you are likely to be religious: Q: If a baseball and bat cost $\$110$, and the bat costs $\$100$ more than the ball,…
City & Guilds survey on views of maths – says more about media stereotyping?
A survey of 3000 pupils aged from seven to 18 for City & Guilds is reported by the BBC to have found that “maths lessons are seen as difficult, irrelevant and boring by about a third of teenagers” and that the subject could be “geared more towards real life”, but that “most agreed that maths…
A student is artistic and loves poetry. Is it more likely she’s studying Chinese or Business?
Let’s suppose that: $60\%$ of students who study Chinese are artistic and love poetry. $20\%$ of students who study Business are artistic and love poetry, and Only about $1\%$ of students study Chinese, whereas about $15\%$ of students study Business. Thus, out of every $1000$ students, there are $10$ studying Chinese, of whom $6$ are…
Saharon Shelah has written more than 1000 papers
From David Roberts on Google+: Saharon Shelah, the well-known Israeli set-theorist and logician, has passed 1000 papers! http://shelah.logic.at/listb.html The page was updated with a rush of almost twenty papers, taking him over the line. Notably, paper #1000 is not listed. +Richard Elwes and I were wondering what the topic of this (rather artificial) milestone paper would be.…
Ideas Illustrated
Interesting, non-mathematically-unaware data visualisations on the blog Ideas Illustrated, including the origins of English words, the distributions of LEGO bricks, and how Wisconsin voters ended up on Null Island. (via David Roberts on Google+)
The Aperiodcast – week of 23/4/2012
Here’s the very first edition of what we’ve cleverly decided to call The Aperiodcast. The plan is to record a short podcast every week or week-and-a-bit (this is the Aperiodical after all) talking about what’s been happening on the site, and pointing out posts that we found particularly interesting or have generated a lot of…
Talk: Alan Turing and the Enigma Machine, by James Grime
James Grime has written an all-new talk, titled “Alan Turing and the Enigma Machine”, which he’ll be delivering 5:30-6:30 on Tuesday the 12th of June at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Clarkson Road, Cambridge. Alan Turing was one of our great 20th century mathematicians, and a pioneer of computer science. However, he may best be remembered…