This is a guest post by Storm Reinbolt, outlining a historical mathematical incident which almost caused a misdefinition! π is an irrational number that is equal to 3.1415926535 (to 10 digits). Things could have been different, however, if Dr. Edward J. Goodwin succeeded in passing Indiana Bill No. 246. This bill would have completely changed π and…
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the months of November and December 2022, is now online at Ganit Charcha. 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.
This is a guest post by David Benjamin. Rational numbers, when written in decimal, either have a terminating string of digits, like $\frac{3}{8}=0.375$, or produce an infinite repeating string: one well-known example is $\frac{1}{7}=0.142857142857142857…$, and for a full list of reciprocals and their decimal strings, the Aperiodical’s own Christian Lawson-Perfect has built a website which…
As part of the 24 Hour Maths Game Show which took place at the end of October 2022, our own Christian Lawson-Perfect designed a maths/games crossover gameshow format to end them all – a mashup of hexagon-fighting TV quiz Blockbusters, and his own personal obsession: interesting mathematical factoids. Welcome to Blockbusters of Interesting Maths!
Here’s a roundup of the maths news we missed in December 2022. Maths News The leap second, referred to in this Independent article as a ‘devastating time quirk’, is finally being abolished. This has been covered in a bunch of places, mostly being quite rude about the leap second, including a writeup in the New…
It’s that time of year when we take a look at the UK Government’s New Years Honours list for any particularly mathematical entries. Here is the selection for this year – if you spot any more, let us know in the comments and we’ll add to the list. Get the full list from gov.uk. Updated…
This week and last I hosted a series of public maths talks featuring disabled presenters. I’ll post about how that went later, but for now I just want to share this clip of me filling time spreading Christmas joy. This is a party trick that Katie Steckles showed me: you can fold a piece of…