Forget 5D cinema and 3D glasses, as there might be something just as interesting to be seen below Ground Zero! It starts back in 1976, when the world was young and still in black and white. I met Roland Drower at UCL when we both started our first year of an astronomy degree. Roland introduced me to the idea that there might be a ‘minus one’ dimension! I don’t know if he had actually come up with this idea himself or if it had been shown to him, but he had thought up several novel ideas so this one is quite likely his. The date was Tuesday 23rd November 1976 and my diary comment was: Roly and ..read more

The celebrate the launch of issue 16 of Chalkdust, we will be hosting a party. Our sponsors G-Research have kindly agreed to host us again, on 28 November in central London, where there will be a maths quiz, pizza and drinks. Find out more and book a free ticket for the event here. Note that bookings will close at midday on 25 Nov. The post Come to the issue 16 launch party appeared first on Chalkdust ..read more

The celebrate the launch of issue 16 of Chalkdust, we will be hosting a party. Our sponsors G-Research have kindly agreed to host us again, on 28 November in central London, where there will be a maths quiz, pizza and drinks. Find out more and book a free ticket for the event here. Note that bookings will close at midday on 25 Nov. The post Come to the issue 16 launch party appeared first on Chalkdust ..read more

Nowadays, it seems that everyone is inundated with spam phone calls, which manifest as a spoofed phone number or name to hide the caller’s true identity. At best, answering such calls results in insistent pitches about things like insurance benefits we are missing out on or roofing inspections we are assured we need. This isn’t terribly different from spam email, for which you might use software to automatically shunt offenders to a junk mailbox, or to /dev/null if you are a particularly frustrated Unix user. For telephone communication, an option is enrolling in ‘no-call lists’ that flag your ..read more

The post How to make sci-fi fans angry appeared first on Chalkdust ..read more

When I lecture on the mathematical theory behind board games, Quarto is one of my favourite examples. It’s a commercially available board game for two players: you can see an example board to the right. Each game piece has four attributes taking one of two values. Each piece is: tall or short; black or white; round or square; and flat-topped or dimpled. A Quarto board has sixteen spaces arranged in a $ 4 \times 4 $ grid. Players take turns placing pieces on the board and the aim is to be the player who places the fourth in a row, column or diagonal which all match in any one attribute (eg four ..read more

Join us in welcoming Issue 16 to the world! Enjoy the articles online or scroll down to view the magazine as a PDF. If you like issue 16, you may be interested in coming to our launch party on 28 November. You can also order a printed copy to your door, just paying P&P. Features In conversation with Martin Hairer We talk to the Fields medallist about his life, his work and his advice to his younger self. I don’t like science fiction Peach Semolina admits her true feelings about science fiction, and delves into the maths of quantum teleportation. A canal runs through it Colin Beveridge ..read more

The post Who’s your font soulmate? appeared first on Chalkdust ..read more

It’s a warm summer afternoon in early July and we’re sat in our respective homes, on our laptops, waiting to talk to Martin. We’re both feeling a little nervous as Martin is renowned for being one of the top researchers in the field of stochastic analysis, maybe in the maths community full stop. The notification pops up on screen, Martin has arrived. He greets us with a friendly hello, and instantly puts us at ease with his polite and cheerful demeanour. Martin is speaking to us remotely from a hotel garden in Helsinki; he’s in Finland for the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) whe ..read more

I have a confession. I’m quite nervous to say this really, but it’s an inescapable fact and I feel the readers of Chalkdust need to know that people like me exist. Here goes… I don’t like science fiction. Phew. That’s a huge weight off my shoulders. It’s true though. Despite being a proud nerd, I just can’t get into sci-fi. It’s not that I don’t like fiction (I do) and it’s certainly not that I don’t like science, but together it does nothing for me. And I know I’m missing out on a lot. I will never know that Darth Vader is Luke’s father. Oops. And I will never know how a flux capacitor w ..read more