Feminist website Hello Ladies has posted an infographic, from EngineeringDegree.net, discussing the discrepancy in achievement between men and women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects. It’s beautifully presented, and compares the early attainment of boys and girls (higher for girls) and then the subsequent decline in both confidence and choosing STEM subjects. Draw your…
RMS Titanic, which sank on 15 April 1912 after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City, is the subject of seemingly a million TV programmes this month and a new article in Physics World. The article attempts to answer the obvious question: When people ask the question “What sank…
On 17th April 2012 the West Midlands Branch of the IMA will hear ‘Routing Military Convoys’ by Andy Verity-Harrison. in Birmingham near New Street railway station. Non-members welcome, no charge is made. Abstract: Current military operations emphasise the need for mobility more than ever. Thus, routing convoys so that they reach their correct destinations in…
The Telegraph numeracy campaign has a review of Intersections, an exhibition available at The Mathematics Gallery at the Science Museum and at the Royal Society from 5 April to 20 June 2012, which “throws new light on the often overlooked common ground of art and maths”. The article writes about Henry Moore, who drew inspiration…
You may be aware that Gathering for Gardner 10 took place last week.
I gave a talk to our internal postgrad forum last week about the princess in a castle puzzle. I made some slides for it using deck.js. They looked quite nice and I could just about get what I wanted in them, but I now know that using SVG in HTML is still an enormous faff…
For the April 2012 issue of Puzzlebomb, I devised Hilbert’s Space-Filling Crossword: The five clues lead to four four-letter words along the rows of the grid, and one sixteen-letter word snaking round the shape given by the thick lines. The puzzle gets its name from the shape traced out by the long word, which is the…