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…
Tiles by Claesson Koivisto Rune
Tiles by Claesson Koivisto Rune:
London Day Trip Stop 4: Sir John Soane’s Museum
Having enjoyed a quick dip into the British Museum I headed to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The Camden Council website describes Lincoln’s Inn Fields as “the largest square in London and the oldest in Camden”, noting that “there has been public open space here since at least the 12th century” and the space was once “popular…
Jonathan Millican wins UK Cyber Security Challenge
This BBC press release/story informs us that a Cambridge computer science student called Jonathan Millican has won the UK Cyber Security Challenge. The BBC story described the competition as “GCHQ-backed”, which made me think it was about canyoucrackit.co.uk, but that seems not to be the case. This thing was apparently a series of competitions sponsored by…
Math/Maths 88: Entertaining, or illegal?
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: Haptic Math App; model of how buds grow into leaves; Mathematical Model Explains How Hosts Survive Parasite Attacks; Sperm Can Do Calculus; Hit game shows like Deal…