Since we’re all busy people, sometimes news and other interesting bits of maths don’t get reported quite as they happen. Here’s a few stories that slipped through the cracks over the summer.
Not Mentioned on The Aperiodical, Summer 2020
The enormous difficulty of telling the truth about escalators with statistics
Earlier this year, when getting the train to work was still a thing for me, I noticed this statistic: 95% of the time escalators were working in the last four weeks.
Fi-Bee-onacci
Andrew Stacey: I have a confession to make that would probably get me thrown out of every respectable Mathematics Society – were I to belong to one. I am not a fan of the Fibonacci sequence. Neither am I keen on the golden ratio. It’s not even transcendental. It’s not really their fault, it’s just…
The permutation clock
I recently had an idea: map the Unix time (seconds since 1st January 1970) to shufflings of a deck of cards. Each second would correspond to a different ordering of the 52 cards. I wanted to think about how mind-bogglingly huge $52!$ is: $52!$ seconds is more than $2 \times 10^{60}$ years. So even if…
Aperiodical Round Up 11: more than you could ever need, want or be able to know
Hello, my name’s Christian Lawson-Perfect and my main mathematical interest is “everything”. Before The Aperiodical existed as its own thing, the only outlet I had for my mathematical eclecticism was a series of posts on the Acme Science blog called Aperiodical Round-Up. Eventually I stopped writing them, as work and family took up more of…
Mathematical Objects: Twenty Pence coin
A conversation about mathematics inspired by a Twenty Pence coin. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Subscribe: RSS | List of episodes
Podcasting about: Mathematical Objects
In this series of posts, we’ll be featuring mathematical podcasts from all over the internet, by speaking to the creators of the podcast and asking them about what they do. We spoke to… ourselves, since we run a podcast here and realised we haven’t done one of these posts about it! Katie and Peter are…