Although we all know Samuel Hansen will do a fantastic job telling stories behind mathematics, provided you donate some money to help him do so, we don’t entirely know what those stories will be. Here are a list of tweets I’ve seen on Samuel’s Twitter stream about this, giving hints. help me tell people how…
Relatively Prime is failing; what you can do to help
Trying to study mathematics without the human stories is like reading a typed transcript of a Rolling Stones concert. The Relatively Prime project will throw the mathematics television out of the hotel window. On Friday as I was going to bed I sent a message to Samuel Hansen, try to think of anything we could…
The unplanned impact of mathematics
Time and again, pure mathematics displays an astonishing quality. A piece of mathematics is developed (or discovered) by a mathematician who is, often, following his or her curiosity without a plan for meeting some identified need or application. Then, later, perhaps decades or centuries later, this mathematics fits perfectly into some need or application.
Maths at the East Midlands Big Bang Fair
Recently I was invited to take a mathematical puzzles stall to the East Midlands Big Bang science fair. This took place in Nottingham yesterday. I gathered a few friends from the Nottingham MathsJam group, which I run, and we planned what we could do with a stall. We agreed a list of puzzles we could…
Developing mathematical thinking – a generational problem?
We were sent a link to a blog post by Katie Steckles for the Math/Maths Podcast a couple of weeks ago. I’m preparing for the recording of episode 52 in a few hours and I thought I would share my thoughts on the topic here. The blog post quotes another, ‘The Mathematics Generation Gap‘. This…
Why I supported Relatively Prime and you should too
Samuel Hansen is asking for people to support his crowd-sourced podcasting project Relatively Prime: Stories from the Mathematical Domain, ideally by donating some money but also by blogging, tweeting, etc. about this. As far as I can see, Samuel is at a crossroads. He passed his Masters degree in mathematics and is about to graduate,…
Topics from the first year of the Math/Maths Podcast
Here is a list of some of the topics we’ve covered on the first year of the Math/Maths Podcast. The 50th episode this weekend will be live streamed (find out more). Ahead of our 50th episode we’d love to hear your memories of the podcast’s first year or anything relevant you’d like to tell us.…