This is a nice short documentary by student filmmaker Damiano Petrucci about mathematics and mathematicians, why they do maths and how they communicate it. It’s got a load of names you’ll recognise, including Oxford’s Ben Green and Aperiodipal Matt Parker.
via Colin Wright, who’s also in it!
Imagine, if you will, a group of people who enjoy recreational mathematics and consequently decide that there should be more places for them to share fun maths. It’s crazy and unprecedented, I know, but humour me.
Recreational Mathematics Magazine does what it says on the tin. It’s a semiannual electronic journal published by the Ludus Association addressing “games and puzzles, problems, mathmagic, mathematics and arts, history of mathematics, math and fun with algorithms, reviews and news.”
On Wednesday 27th November 2013, friend of The Aperiodical and standup mathematician Matt Parker tweeted a link to his latest YouTube video.
In the video Matt apologises for some remarks on the imperial number system that he made in an earlier Number Hub video about the A4 paper scale. He then goes into some of the quirkiness of the many imperial number units used for measuring length. It is an unusual ‘apology’, although very entertaining.
This got me thinking about how I think about lengths, and I tweeted that I often think in ‘metric-imperial’ units of length, or multiples of exactly 25mm in my job as a civil and structural engineer – a metric inch, if you like. Colin Wright suggested the name ‘minch’ for these units; there are then two score minch to the metre.
Some news from the world of capitalism: various maths people have things you can spend money on. Our roving reporters investigate.
Maths Inspiration, a maths theatre show which has been touring the country for a few years providing large-scale theatre shows for GCSE and A-Level students, has now released a set of DVDs of a special series of talks, which were filmed earlier this year.
Here’s a quick round-up of some news stories from the tail end of 2012 that we characteristically failed to write up!
Since the date is palindromic, and the weekday starts with an F, it’s time for another instalment of Follow Friday! Here’s some people I recommend following if you’re on Twitter, and some enjoyable tweets/links for you to look at if not.