Here’s the second edition of our new podcast, All Squared. This time we talked to Dr Andrew Taylor, PhD, about nonsense formulas in the news. In particular, since we recorded very close to pancake day, we took a close look at the various “formulas for the perfect pancake” printed in UK newspapers.
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PRIMES, it turns out, isn’t just a word for numbers without any proper factors – it’s also a mentoring programme for high school students in the USA, based at MIT. The students visit there once a week from February to May, and work with academics on real research. They also run similar programmes for computer science and computational biology.
The scheme has recently been extended to allow students not local to MIT (or in possession of a private jet or teleporter ((Although if they’ve invented a teleporter, this scheme probably can’t help them much)) ) to attend. PRIMES-USA is a national scheme for students across the country, which requires them to visit MIT for a conference in May, but the rest of the meetings take place via Skype.
Just over a month ago I posted that Number Gossip had been killed. Well,
It looks like Number Gossip is back, as gossipy and numerate as ever. Tanya hasn’t announced anything on her blog yet, so I thought a quick public-service note was in order.
For several years, Tanya Khovanova’s Number Gossip was an invaluable resource for maths fans whenever they found themselves saying, “that looks like a special number!” It was a simple list of integers and all the interesting facts known about each one; there were prime numbers, odd numbers, evil numbers, perfect numbers, and countless facts about unique properties of numbers.