Here’s a roundup of mathematical things that have happened in March 2022.
Aperiodical News Roundup – March 2022
John Conway and his fruitful fractions
Following on from the series of ‘Pascal’s Triangle and its Secrets‘ posts, guest author David Benjamin shares another delightful piece of mathematics – this time relating to prime numbers. The Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria ($\sim$325 BC-265 BC) was arguably the first to prove that there are an infinite number of primes – and since…
Now I’m calculating with constructive reals!
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…
British Science Week mathematicians poster competition
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:
MathsJam Leuven recap, February 2022
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…
Each Edge Peach Pear Plum
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…
Probability, statistics and Pascal’s other contributions
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,…