Mike Croucher works as a science and engineering applications support specialist at the University of Manchester. He asked us for help publicising a Kickstarter project to port Octave to Android, so we thought the best way to do that was to ask him to explain what it’s about himself.
In what flipping dimension is a square peg in a round hole just as good as a round peg in a square hole?
In what flipping dimension is a square peg in a round hole just as good as a round peg in a square hole? Let’s start at the beginning. My Plus magazine puzzle from March asks “Which gives a tighter fit: a square peg in a round hole or a round peg in a square hole?”…
AMS introduces “mobile pairing” to enable access from tablets
One of the many annoying thing about academic paywalls, leaving aside whether you think they should exist or not, is that unless you can log in with Athens or Shibboleth, you can only get access through a PC at your university or workplace. If you try to catch up on reading once you’re back at…
What’s the intersection of the set of mathematicians and the set of popes?
Hint: a man who started life with one name but later adopted the one he is today remembered as.
New journals attempting to address publication bias
There is an article in the Wall Street Journal about journals that publish negative results. There is a problem with scientific research that positive results are more likely to get published than negative ones. This can lead to spurious statistical results and researchers wasting their time because a procedure or technique might appear more successful than it…
Math52: A Fresh Way to Teach?
‘Math52: A Fresh Way to Teach’ is a Kickstarter project currently seeking funding. The organisers offer the following promise: “Every week for a year we’ll create a short video exploring a unique application of math in everyday life.” The emphasis is on providing teachers with material to enrich their teaching. You can find out more by…
Flat tori in three-dimensional space and convex integration
French researchers Vincent Borrelli, Saïd Jabrane, Francis Lazarus and Boris Thibert have described an isometric embedding of the flat torus in 3D space, using the convex integration theory developed by Gromov in the 1970s. That means they’ve produced a surface which is topologically a torus – it has a single hole — which preserves distances between…