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.
The International Mathematical Union is trying to get UNESCO to make March 14, commonly known as π Day, the International Day of Mathematics.
The ubiquitous Fry is on our screens again, with a programme about Platonism, on BBC Four.
In Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry’s Mysterious World of Maths, “Dr Hannah Fry explores the mystery of maths. Is it invented like a language or is it discovered and part of the fabric of the universe?”
Episode 1 is on the iPlayer for about three more weeks, and episode 2 of 3 is on tonight at 21:00.
You may have seen our post last month about our remote Wiki Editing Day, this coming Saturday 12th May. We’re hoping to get a bunch of people in different locations editing pages on Wikiquote and other Wikimedia sites, to improve the visibility of female mathematicians. Here’s how you can get involved.
This tweet from the QI Elves popped up on my Twitter timeline:
The odds of being crushed by a meteor are considerably lower (i.e. more likely) than those of winning the jackpot on the National Lottery.
— Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) January 11, 2018
In the account’s usual citationless factoid style, the Elves state that you’re more likely to be crushed by a meteor than to win the jackpot on the lottery.
The replies to this tweet were mainly along the lines of this one from my internet acquaintance Chris Mingay:
Should we not be getting almost weekly stories of people being crushed by a meteor then ?
— Chris Mingay (@GhostMutt) January 11, 2018
Yeah, why don’t we hear about people being squished by interplanetary rocks all the time? I’d tune in to that!
The BBC News Budget 2017 calculator
The day after last week’s budget, I logged onto the BBC News website and clicked on their budget calculator to find out if I was a winner or a loser. The questions are pretty simple: first off, it asks how much you drink, smoke and drive, and then it asks how much you earn, plus a few bits and bobs to cover technicalities. Then, it spits out an answer: did Phil leave you feeling flush, was it more of a hammering at the hands of Hammond? I came away £8 a month better off…and significantly angrier than I expected.
Thomas Woolley has written in to tell us about the new podcast he’s launched with a couple of friends.
It’s called “Maths at: the Movies” (I suspect the colon is leaving them wiggle room to look at other media) and features co-hosts Thomas and Ben M. Parker chatting about films with “interested observer” and asymptotically anonymous woman “The Wonderful Liz”.