On Google+ (sadly in a post with limited visibility, so I can’t link directly to it), Rongmin Lu (via David Roberts) highlights a case of “american whispers”, where a piece of research is helped along by press releases and media paraphrasing to become a completely different result. Here’s how American whispers works: 1. You publish a…
Laziest torus identified
Or, in similarly simplified headlinese, “Math finds the best doughnut”. A little bit more precisely, Fernando C. Marques and André Neves claim in a preprint on the arXiv to have proved the Willmore conjecture, that the minimum achievable mean curvature of a torus is $\frac{2}{\pi^2}$. The article I linked to is some surprisingly non-stupid coverage from the Huffington…
John Wood & Paul Harrison “One more kilometre”
[vimeo url=http://vimeo.com/37796909] Look at the fluid dynamics!
MathsJam March 2012 Photos
If you’ve taken a picture at a MathsJam and you’d like to share it, please submit it to our tumblr.
Interesting Esoterica Summation, volume 3
Summing up some more interesting esoterica seems like the right thing to do at the moment, so here’s that. A reminder: every now and then I encounter a paper or a book or an article that grabs my interest but isn’t directly useful for anything. It might be about some niche sub-sub-subtopic I’ve never heard of,…
Maths Busking enters university outreach & public engagement competition
Maths Busking has been entered for ‘Engage U’, a “European Competition for Best Innovations in University Outreach and Public Engagement”. A detailed entry makes the case for Maths Busking, including the following description: Maths Busking aims to show the public the surprising and fascinating side of mathematics through the medium of street performance. The EngageU…
Minds of Modern Mathematics iPad App
Much is being made on Twitter of the IBM Minds of Modern Mathematics App. Okay if you have an iPad, I suppose. According to Wired, this: presents an interactive timeline of the history of mathematics and its impact on society from 1000 to 1960… The app is based on an original, 50-foot-long “Men of Modern Mathematics”…