One would be hard put to find a set of whole numbers with a more fascinating history and more elegant properties surrounded by greater depths of mystery — and more totally useless — than the perfect numbers. — Martin Gardner There are countless ways to classify integers. Happy, perfect, friendly, sociable, abundant, extravagant, cute, interesting, frugal, deficient, hungry, undulating,…
This month’s MathsJam was well attended – we matched last month’s turnout of 11, albeit one of that number was in the form of Ed Bradshaw, the organiser of the Washington DC MathsJam. For Ed, it was 4pm and he was in his office, using Google Plus for a live video connection to a MathsJam…
Following the recent trend for Alan Turing petitions to be filed with the UK Government e-petitions website, and in particular the current Turing bank note petition, a new petition shows a satirical twist: Alan Turing is a national hero. His contribution to computer science, and hence to the life of the nation and the world,…
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released. A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. This week Samuel and Peter spoke about: Endre Szemerédi wins the Abel Prize 2012; Automatically tagging the World Service archive; Intel Science Fair; 72nd Putnam; The Spanish link in cracking the Enigma code; Greater…
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has decided to award the Abel Prize for 2012 to Endre Szemerédi (Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, and Department of Computer Science, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA) “for his fundamental contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, and in…
A post on the BBC Research & Development Blog outlines work on automatic tagging of speech audio. The work is concerned with the World Service archive, which apparently has “very sparse” associated programme data. The archive “covers many decades and consists of about two and a half years of high-quality continuous audio content”. The aim…
When I was a student there was a door in the basement of the university library marked “This door must remained closed at all times”. I remember joking that perhaps no one could remember what was behind it, and of course they couldn’t check. The BBC are reporting that GCHQ have received two Engima machines…