The Maths Careers website has launched its Maths Photo Competition 2012. The competition is open to four categories: 11-13, 14-16, 17-19 and Undergraduate (one entry per person per category). This asks entrants to take a photo (with no people in the photo) and add “an exciting, maths related caption”. The prize is a £100 Amazon…
Mockus, mathematician-king
Charlotte Bouckaert shared this story on Google+. It’s about Antanas Mockus, a mathematician and philosopher who was elected mayor of Bogotá twice. It’s a fascinating read. People were desperate for a change, for a moral leader of some sort. The eccentric Mockus, who communicates through symbols, humor, and metaphors, filled the role. When many hated…
Puzzlebomb – March 2012
Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 3 of Puzzlebomb, for March 2012, can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 3 – March 2012 The solutions to Issue 3 can be found here: Puzzlebomb – Issue 3 – March 2012 – Solutions Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.
HyperRogue II – a roguelike on the hyperbolic plane
I was directed to this game by a retweet by @haggismaths. It’s a roguelike (text-based explorey role-playing adventure game) which takes place on the hyperbolic plane. It’s a lot of fun. It’s hard to get your head round the fact that there’s a lot more stuff in between two lines in hyperbolic space than in…
Happy π day
People celebrate today as “π day“, an official designation in the US* 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812848111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196…5… Do you know how we know those digits? If you’d like to find out, I’ve written a blog post over at Second-Rate Minds: “How to calculate π“. * This is not necessarily the best day. “3.14” is a very crude approximation for…
How to calculate π
A new post is available over at Second-Rate Minds by Peter Rowlett. How would you calculate ? I remember being sent as a boy of ten into the schoolyard to find circular objects to measure. Our attempts to wrap a tape around a dustbin lid clearly did not represent the optimal method. Perhaps you know…
Conformal Models of Hyperbolic Geometry by Vladimir Bulatov
Vladimir Bulatov makes art, including metal sculptures and jewellery, based on tilings of non-Euclidean spaces. He has posted online some slides he made to go with a talk he gave at the JMM in 2010, about the many ways conformal mappings of the hyperbolic plane can produce interesting images. Quite a few of the diagrams…