A while ago I made myself a calculator. I don’t know if anyone else uses it, but for the particular way I like doing calculations, it’s been really good. You’d think that if a calculator does anything, it should perform calculations correctly. But all calculators get things wrong sometimes! This is the story of how…
I wrote a mathematics-themed competition for British Science Week, which is a UK-wide event lasting ten days taking place this month. The competition calls for individuals or groups to research the life and/or work of a mathematician and produce a poster to share their findings. The six mathematicians available to choose from are:
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a MathsJam recap, but having restarted the MathsJam in Leuven after a hiatus, Dieter was too excited not to share what they’d been up to. The first (re)edition of the Maths Jam in Leuven (Historic university city in Belgium) was a tiny success. I brought a couple of physical copies of…
At the 2021 UK MathsJam Gathering, I gave a talk on a subject that has bothered me more than is reasonable: the graph-theoretic layout of the narrative of the baby’s book Each Peach Pear Plum, by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. It’s one of my son’s favourite books to fall asleep to. It was his older…
This is the final part in the Pascal pentalogy, a series of guest posts by David Benjamin exploring the secrets of Pascal’s Triangle. Probability and combinations In Part 1 of this series we stated that Pascal is credited with being the founder of probability theory – but credit also needs to be given to other mathematicians,…
To celebrate 14th March (π day), MathsCity in Leeds is hosting a competition to celebrate everyone’s favourite geometrical shape whose circumference is π times its diameter: the circle.
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of February, is now online at Fractal Kitty. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.