This Wednesday, friend of The Aperiodical Matt Parker compered an event at London’s O2 Arena in which the world record for most simultaneous Rubik’s cube solves was smashed by a crowd including schools groups, individuals, maths fans and the UK’s current speedsolving champion, Robert Yau.
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Matt Parker’s Twitter Puzzle – 12th Nov
Matt Parker, the internet’s own number ninja, has tweeted the following maths nugget:
Type any number into a calculator and then divide it by 7, 11 and 13. Why do the first six decimal places always sum to 27? #mathspuzzle
— Matt Parker (@standupmaths) November 12, 2012
Manchester Science Festival Blog – Matt Parker’s Domino Computer
In case you weren’t already excited enough about Matt Parker’s Domino Computer (see: Math/Maths Episode 112, and articles on this website), the Manchester Science Festival blog has posted an official press release about the event, including photos of the domino assembly team lying around on the floor (none of us are professional models, but we did our best for the camera), and quotes from Matt about how important domino computers are.
Top marks go to sometime Aperiodical author Paul, for looking super-bored in the group photo. I’m sure he was thinking about hard maths.
Manchester MathsJam, September 2012
This month saw a record high turnout, requiring as many as three tables being pushed together, a whole bag of maltesers and a tin of shortbread someone got for Christmas and hadn’t eaten yet. We also had one new attendee who had previously been a regular at Newcastle MathsJam, and has now moved to Manchester for a PhD. Not that it’s a competition or anything, but in your face Newcastle. In fact, the turnout was so large that I couldn’t even keep track of everything that was going on, and when I collected in all the scrap paper I found people had written down several things I wasn’t aware we talked about, including the method for cube rooting large numbers used by Maths Busking.
Rubik’s Tube
Numberphile filmmaker and general internet legend Brady Haran has been busy putting together a series of YouTube videos about the Rubik’s cube, with contributions from Aperiodical friends Matt Parker and James Grime. The videos also feature lots of solving clips sent in by viewers, and Aperiodical Editor triumvir and sometime maths-talker-abouter Katie Steckles (that’s me) occasionally pops in to make comments and state facts which are no longer true (a world record was broken 4 days after filming).
Matt Parker needs help building a domino computer
Friend-in-good-standing of The Aperiodical, Matt Parker, has something big planned for Manchester Science Festival and he needs your help.
Matt is trying to build a computer out of dominoes.
Matt Parker’s writing a book!
The Bookseller have announced that Penguin Press have bought the rights to a book by Matt Parker. Things To Make And Do In The Fourth Dimension is pitched as
an alternative maths lesson, with activities and thought experiments helping people go beyond the classroom to make calculators out of dominoes and see what soap bubbles have to do with calculus.
I like the sound of “a nine-publisher auction, where all bids were made in prime numbers, numbers derived from pi, and other mathematical figures.”
Matt Parker said to The Aperiodical, “I’m very proud to be writing a book; I think books are really the technology of the future. I see a lot of promise in this whole written-word field.”
Source: Penguin beats nine to Parker book.