As part of the 24 Hour Maths Game Show which took place at the end of October 2022, our own Christian Lawson-Perfect designed a maths/games crossover gameshow format to end them all – a mashup of hexagon-fighting TV quiz Blockbusters, and his own personal obsession: interesting mathematical factoids. Welcome to Blockbusters of Interesting Maths!
Next week, I (Aperiodical team member Katie Steckles) and Sophie Maclean (Chalkdust team member and cool maths person) are off to Heidelberg to cover the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. The HLF is an annual conference bringing together respected maths and computer science laureates (including Fields medalists, Abel Prize winners and others) to meet each other and keen PhD students from all over the world. We’ll be writing for the conference’s Spektrum.de SciLogs blog, keeping it updated on the topics people are talking about and general other mathematical goings-on at the event.
Check the HLF Blog to read our posts as they appear, and visit the HLF website for more information about the conference.
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 currently in their third season of fortnightly episodes, with plenty more to come.
Our Katie was on BBC Two last night! As part of the QI Christmas special, Katie told that old chestnut about infinitely many mathematicians walking into a bar.
Viewers in the UK can see the show on the iPlayer; Katie’s segment starts about 12 minutes in.
Katie is running an Aperiodical advent calendar (Aperiodvent 2018), with fun maths Christmas treats every day. Behind the door for 7th December was Parabolic Sewing.
This is not unrelated to what I submitted as my entry to The Big Internet Math-Off last summer. I have been revisiting this idea ready for a class next week in my second year programming module.
Guest author Kevin Houston has written a round-up of maths-related events at next week’s British Science Festival.
The British Science Festival is taking place in Hull and the Humber 11-14th September. There are lots of talks so I’ve put together a handy guide to talks with a mathematics-related theme.
TL;DR: We’re holding a distributed Wikipedia edit-a-thon on Saturday, May 12th, 2018 from 10am to improve the visibility of women mathematicians on the Wikiquotes Mathematics page. Join in from wherever you are! Details below, and in this Google Doc.
Extension and abstraction without apparent direction or purpose is fundamental to the discipline. Applicability is not the reason we work, and plenty that is not applicable contributes to the beauty and magnificence of our subject.
– Peter Rowlett, “The unplanned impact of mathematics”, Nature 475, 2011, pp. 166-169.Trying to solve real-world problems, researchers often discover that the tools they need were developed years, decades or even centuries earlier by mathematicians with no prospect of, or care for, applicability.
– Peter Rowlett, “The unplanned impact of mathematics”, Nature 475, 2011, pp. 166-169.There is no way to guarantee in advance what pure mathematics will later find application. We can only let the process of curiosity and abstraction take place, let mathematicians obsessively take results to their logical extremes, leaving relevance far behind, and wait to see which topics turn out to be extremely useful. If not, when the challenges of the future arrive, we won’t have the right piece of seemingly pointless mathematics to hand.
Peter Rowlett, “The unplanned impact of mathematics”, Nature 475, 2011, pp. 166-169.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I have every admiration for Peter and his work; his is a thoughtful voice of reason, and it’s not at all unreasonable for the Wikiquote page on mathematics to cite his writing.