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    Where could you (or your rich pal) give everyone $1 million?

    By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted March 7, 2020

    Recently someone on Twitter, and then two people on US cable news, said that Michael Bloomberg could have used the \$500 million he spent on his presidential campaign to give everyone in the USA \$1 million. This caused quite a fuss. In short, someone divided 500 by 327, saw that the answer was bigger than…

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    Mathematical Objects

    Mathematical Objects: Robot caterpillar

    By Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett. Posted February 28, 2020

    Robot caterpillar (photo by @stecks)

    A conversation about combinatorics, the mathematics of counting, inspired by a robot caterpillar. Presented by Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Subscribe: RSS | List of episodes

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    Interviews, Podcasts

    Podcasting about: Isaac Newton Institute Podcast

    By Katie Steckles. Posted February 27, 2020

    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 Dan Aspel, communications officer at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, about the Institute’s in-house podcast.

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    News

    Katherine Johnson (1918-2020)

    By Peter Rowlett. Posted February 24, 2020

    Mathematician Katherine Johnson has died at the age of 101. She calculated rocket trajectories and orbits for early NASA space flights, including the missions that sent the first American in space, the first American to orbit the Earth and the first men to walk on the Moon, as well as contributing early work on the…

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    News

    Ada Lovelace Day is fundraising

    By Peter Rowlett. Posted February 24, 2020

    Ada Lovelace Day (which is much more than just a day) is fundraising.

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    Blackboard Bold, Travels in a Mathematical World

    The smallest unique Cheshire Cat

    By Peter Rowlett and Katie Steckles. Posted February 22, 2020

    A red Cheshire cat wearing a blue hat

    At the MathsJam annual gathering, one of the many activities attendees can participate in is a competition competition – entrants each come up with a competition and submit it into a larger competition, other attendees enter each of the competitions within the competition competition, and the organisers get the chance to make long and confusing…

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    cp's mathem-o-blog

    SAMDOB – mess up the order of operations

    By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted February 21, 2020

    While I’m on strike, I’m catching up on stuff I’ve made but never posted about here. At the Talking Maths in Public conference last August, I was talking with Katie Steckles and Kevin Houston about the order of operations. I think that another one of those ambiguously-written sums had gone round Twitter again. I said…

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The Aperiodical © 2026 Peter Rowlett, Katie Steckles and Christian Lawson-Perfect. All posts © their authors. All rights reserved.