I was going to save this for an Aperiodical Round Up but it’s such a good thing I thought I’d post it straight away. Project Gutenberg has moved on from offering just plain-text transcriptions of books: volunteers have been outstandingly generous with their time and produced LaTeX versions of many maths books, producing versions that…
New Careers section on Plus Magazine
Plus Magazine have launched a new careers section. Aimed at teachers, students, career advisors and parents, the section offers a glimpse of where maths can take you. For a long time these have been the best sources of careers advice for mathematics in the UK so a collaboration should be very fruitful. This gives information…
Volcanic eruptions follow Benford’s Law
An article in Ars Technica reports on an investigation of the area and ages of volcanic calderas and the duration of volcanic eruptions between 1900 and 2009 in relation to Benford’s Law. Apparently Benford’s laws fit the eruption duration data “very well” and caldera areas offer “pretty good” fit, though the latter indicated that “some…
Biography of Turing by his mother republished
Barry Cooper, Professor of Pure Mathematics at Leeds and Chair of the Turing Centenary Advisory Committee, writes in the Guardian a personal account of an interest in Turing and his efforts to get the limited edition biography written by Turing’s mother Sara republished. Written from a mother’s viewpoint, Sara provides a unique insight into the…
Running model in reverse to determine rate of extinction not reliable
An article on the BBC News website outlines methods for determining numbers used in measures of biodiversity loss, such as the claim by the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2007 that we are “experiencing the greatest wave of extinction since the disappearance of the dinosaurs”. One problem, the BBC explains, is that No-one knows how…
Alan Turing papers on code breaking released by GCHQ
The BBC reports that two papers by Alan Turing, believed to have been written while he was working at Bletchley Park, have been released by GCHQ. The papers, ‘The Applications of Probability to Crypt’, and ‘Paper on the Statistics of Repetitions’, apparently use mathematical analysis to try and determine which are the more likely Enigma…
Inclusion and Exclusion and the new GMAT
Dublin native Colm Mulcahy has been in the Department of Mathematics at Spelman College since 1988. His interests include algebra, number theory, geometry and mathematical card principles and effects. Follow him on Twitter at @CardColm and also check out @WWMGT. The last question, under the heading “Two-Part Analysis”, at the end of this NYT article (from…