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.
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.
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.
Anyone who hasn’t yet spotted the YouTube channel Numberphile (call yourself a maths fan?) would do well to check out its amazing selection of videos, all loosely themed around numbers – not all of which are integers, either – but now edging on giving up on that pretence and just continuing to post videos about interesting bits of maths.
Since it’s $\tau$ Day, we thought we’d give Festival of the Spoken Nerd constant-fans Matt Parker and Steve Mould a chance to air their respective viewpoints in the $\tau$ vs $\pi$ debate. It’s a maths showdown!
The Turing Solution, a BBC Radio 4 documentary presented by Matt Parker covering “mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing, and his role in the invention of the computer”, was broadcast last week and is currently available on BBC iPlayer. A quick (28 min) biography covering various aspects of his life and work (particularly including his mathematics and work in early computing), with a wide range of interesting contributors, this is well worth catching.
Matt Parker (@standupmaths on Twitter) has tweeted the following Maths Puzzle, in light of the forthcoming transit of Venus:
If you’re bored: Venus orbits the Sun in 224.70069 days while the Earth takes 365.242199. Ish. Feel free to work out how often it overtakes.
— Matt Parker (@standupmaths) June 3, 2012
Festival Of The Spoken Nerd, the “comedy night for the insatiably sci-curious” hosted by Helen Arney, Matt Parker and Steve Mould, is going on tour.