It’s been two months since I last wrote one of these! March was a haze of overwork and stress for me, so I didn’t write a recap for March’s MathsJam while it was still March. Peter Rowlett, who was visiting Newcastle as part of his mission to avoid having to think up new puzzles for…
Spherikal by Ion
[vimeo url=http://vimeo.com/39792837] Spherikal by Ion
UK Open Sudoku and Puzzle Tournaments
Yes, I know Sudoku isn’t really maths, but anyone interested in puzzles might want to know about this event, held in Manchester next week. The UK Puzzle Association is a non-profit organisation that selects the UK teams for the World Puzzle Championships and World Sudoku Championships, which this year will be held in Kraljevica, Croatia in October.…
A little applet to make maths for screengrabbing
Paul Taylor wanted an easy way to write some maths he could take a screengrab of, for use as an icon. Before I intervened he was doing something unnatural with wikipedia, so I wrote a little applet using MathJax: “make big maths“. Quite a few tools like this exist, using mimetex or some other CGI…
Japanese researchers create a crab-based computer
This is the platonic ideal of an entry in my Interesting Esoterica collection: two scientists from Kobe University and one from UWE’s excellently-named International Center of Unconventional Computing have written a paper, Robust Soldier Crab Ball Gate, claiming that swarms of soldier crabs Mictyris guinotae can be persuaded to act as logic gates, from which a universal…
Hunger Games survival analysis
Somebody has done a statistical analysis of The Hunger Games, to see how the lottery works and what factors, if any, are linked with longer survival. Yes, he describes his methodology in fine detail. Wonderfully overthought. A comment by yellowcandy in the MetaFilter thread about this page warns us not to get too carried away: I love statistics,…
Maths and Music Lecture April 23rd Thame | Pulse-Project.org
Dr Thomas Woolley of Oxford University’s Mathematical Institute will give a lecture on ‘Maths and Music’ on Monday 23 April at Thame Town Hall, starting at 7.30pm. The abstract follows. Free tickets are available from Thame Town Hall. Music is the expression of thoughts, ideas and feelings.Mathematics is the language of fact, rigour and knowledge.…