Much has been made on Twitter of the recent list from CareerCast.com and posted at the Wall Street Journal of the 200 “Best and Worst Jobs of 2012” (a tweet on this from the IMA has been retweeted over fifty times). The reason? Mathematician is in the top ten, at number ten in fact. There…
BAMC writing prize
The IMA have announced a competition connected to the 54th British Applied Mathematics Colloquium (BAMC) which took place last month at University College London. Four prizes of £100 are available for the best reports of between 500 and 1,500 words by attendees at the recent BAMC who are students or completed their PhDs within the…
Electoral reforms and non-transitive dice
Guest post by Andrew, of Manchester MathsJam. Andrew can be found on Twitter as @andrew_taylor and blogs occasionally about maths, among other things, at andrewt.net. “Grime Dice” are a set of five coloured dice with unusual combinations of numbers on them. The red die, for example, has five fours and a nine. The blue one has…
Labyrinth salt installation by Motoi Yamamoto
Labyrinth salt installation by Motoi Yamamoto:
Press release mayhem
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!