YouTube have introduced a text-only mode for April Fool’s Day – TEXTp. If you view a video, where the choice of quality – 360p, 480p, etc. – is, you can choose TEXTp. Here is what I look like in ASCII characters giving my cryptography talk (click to enlarge): Here is a link to my video…
Podcast: Episode 57 – History of Maths and x, Shape of the cosmos: Developments from Newton to Einstein
These are the show notes for episode 57 of the Travels in a Mathematical World Podcast. 57 is the so-called Grothendieck prime. The story goes that brilliant mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck was asked to name a prime number and gave 57, which is, of course, not prime. This story is used to illustrate how some mathematicians…
Mathematics Today April 2010: University Liaison Officer’s Report
[N.B. Followers of the podcast will know that there was a delay in releasing new episodes, so the podcast has not, at time of writing, reached 60 episodes.] Podcast at sixty By the time you read this, the Travels in a Mathematical World podcast will have released sixty episodes. I began producing the podcast in…
Podcast: Episode 56 – Edmund Harriss, Development and teaching of mathematical ideas
These are the show notes for episode 56 of the Travels in a Mathematical World Podcast. 56 is the 6th tetrahedral number, meaning it is the sum of the first six triangular numbers. More about tetrahedral numbers from thesaurus.maths.org. This week on the podcast I spoke to Edmund Harriss of the University of Leicester, and…
Podcast: Episode 55 – Edmund Harriss, Tilings, motivations and Street Maths
These are the show notes for episode 55 of the Travels in a Mathematical World Podcast. 55 is the largest triangular number in the Fibonacci sequence. More about 55 from Number Gossip. This week on the podcast I spoke to Edmund Harriss of the University of Leicester, who speaks about his research area of tiling…
Countability and uncountability in Facebook groups
If you use Facebook, you may be familiar with the groups based on the ‘million march‘-principle, who are trying to get to a certain number of members to affect some change. A lot of these groups are outright silly, or based around issues unlikely to drum up the enthusiasm of the masses. A quick search…
Podcast: Episode 54 – Maths news with Sarah Shepherd
These are the show notes for episode 54 of the Travels in a Mathematical World Podcast. 54 is the number of colored squares on a Rubik’s cube. More about 54 from Number Gossip. This week on the podcast I met Sarah Shepherd, PhD student at the University of Nottingham and Editor of iSquared Magazine, and…