Me (Katie) and Paul have restarted our regular monthly puzzle sheets, which were previously hosted here on the Aperiodical, in the form of a Patreon. If you like slightly silly, slightly clever puzzles and want to support what we’re doing, you can sign up as a patron to be sent puzzles each month and access…
Mathigon is an online interactive textbook for mathematics, which we’ve written about here before. They’ve just launched updated versions of the phone/tablet app version of their site, including new features and an offline mode.
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of August, is now online at Apud Nimbum. 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.
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.
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.
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…
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…