A classic maths puzzle involves a line of one hundred prisoners, who have each been given a black or white hat by their nefarious captor, and must each correctly shout out the colour of their hat to win freedom. The twist is that the prisoners don’t know the colour of their own hat, and though…
Leaves don’t just grow equally in all directions, or they would have a regular shape. To understand how a few cells give rise to such complex structures as leaves is described in the abstract of a new paper in Science as “a major challenge in biology”. The paper presents a new model that shows how…
Nominations are open for the Royal Statistical Society’s awards for statistical excellence in journalism. Eligible work must have been published or broadcast between 1 January 2011 and 31 December 2011. Awards are to be made in three categories: print publication online publication broadcast media When nominating, you are asked to indicate in which area or…
I’ve just uploaded to youtube a video I made with Katie Steckles to demonstrate why zero-knowledge protocols exist and how one works. Katie is a habitual liar, so we followed the zero-knowledge protocol described in the paper, “Cryptographic and Physical Zero-Knowledge Proof Systems for Solutions of Sudoku Puzzles” which you can download from http://www.mit.edu/~rothblum/papers/sudoku.pdf By following…
Before this magnificent website existed, I published four editions of what was then known as The Internet Maths Aperiodical at Samuel Hansen’s site ACME Science. You can find those earlier works in their own category at ACME Science.
This is a roundup of things which happened at Manchester MathsJam, February 2012. First, we discuss a puzzle I found on Futility Closet, a blog of curiosities by Greg Ross which is sometimes mathematical. The Martian Census Bureau compiled the marital history of every male and female Martian, living and dead: Never married: 6,823,041; Married…
I listened to Samuel Hansen’s interview with local-boy-made-good Neil deGrasse Tyson (that’s an in joke for those who have listened, so you’d better go and listen, right?). They speak about mathematics in astrophysics (“math in astrophysic”?), space exploration & research, outreach and more. In talking mathematics, Dr Tyson covers an unplanned impact of mathematics and…