One of the reasons given against a pardon for Alan Turing in a November 2011 blog post by John Graham-Cumming (who successfully campaigned for a Turing apology in 2009) was that the Protection of Freedoms bill, if passed, would make a pardon unnecessary. This is because this specifically allows for the disregarding of convictions under…
Wikipedia adds MathJax display option
According to a post by Frédéric Wang on the Mozilla MathML mailing list, Wikipedia now supports rendering mathematics via MathJax (and through it, MathML). Wang says: Today, a new Math rendering mode has been added to Wikipedia. You need a Wikipedia account to use it. In My preferences => Appearance => Math, choose “MathJax”. Once enabled,…
Feminine role models found to not motivate girls to study maths
Diana Betz and Denise Sekaquaptewa conducted two studies in the USA into attempts to counter stereotypes, reported in a University of Michigan press release.
Mathematical thinking and religious belief
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.…