This is a guest post by Elliott Baxby, a maths undergraduate student who wants to share an appreciation of geometrical proofs. I remember the days well when I first learnt about loci and constructions – what a wonderful thing. Granted, I love doing them now; to be able to appreciate how Euclid developed his incredible proofs on geometry. In school, it was a slightly different story. Whilst I was meant to be constructing triangles and drawing a locus of a point, the school-supplied compasses had other ideas – slipping around unhelpfully, making them useless for the task. Understandably, I’d oft ..read more

In this series of posts, we’ll be featuring mathematical podcasts from all over the internet, by speaking to the creators of the podcast and asking them about what they do. We spoke to Marcello Seri and Marit van Straaten from the Bernoulli Institute at the University of Groningen, about their podcast, It’s Not Just Numbers. Podcast title: It’s Not Just Numbers Website: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/not-just-numbers Links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts Average episode length: 1 hour Recommended episodes: Intro Episode, Teaching Mathematics (S1E03) What is your podcast about, a ..read more

With the emphasis on occasionally, I’m occasionally working to (sort of) recreate Martin Gardner’s cover images from Scientific American, the so-called Gardner’s Dozen. This time I’m looking at the cover image from the November 1959 issue. The column is ‘How three modern mathematicians disproved a celebrated conjecture of Leonhard Euler’, about the so-called Euler’s Spoilers, the story of three mathematicians – Parker, Bose and Shrikhande – who had disproved a conjecture of Euler’s about Latin squares. The column was reprinted as chapter 14 in his New Mathematical Diversions from Scientific Am ..read more

The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of March 2024, is now online at Tom Rocks Maths. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information ..read more

A few months ago a group of us launched a membership club, The Finite Group, which you can join! A big update is the lineup — your membership now supports the work of and gives you access to content from mathematician and TikTok star Ayliean MacDonald, as well as Chalkdust’s Matthew Scroggs and The Aperiodical’s Katie Steckles and me. Membership gives you access to a chat community and monthly livestreams. For a taste of the livestreams, check out this π minute video! The big news is that the next livestream will be free to view live online on 27th March from 5-6pm GMT. All four of us will b ..read more

In this series of posts, we’ll be featuring mathematical video and streaming channels from all over the internet, by speaking to the creators of the channel and asking them about what they do. We spoke to Wolfram about their CEO Stephen Wolfram and his Twitch streaming channel. Channel title: Stephen_Wolfram Link: twitch.tv/stephen_wolfram Topics covered: Science & Technology, Language Design, Business Average stream length: 1 hour 15 min Recommended videos: Math Storytelling: Part One Live CEOing Ep 748: Language Design Review of Calculus & Algebra Features for 14.0 Any of the  ..read more

You know how loads of things in maths are named for the wrong person? In 1996, a fun quiz appeared in The Mathematical Gazette based on history of maths misconceptions. It contained a series of questions where the obvious answer is not correct, such as “Who discovered Cramer’s rule?”, “Did Pascal discover the Pascal triangle?” and “Who first published Simpson’s rule?” I was looking for a demo to show my students that generative AI programs are not producing accurate knowledge when I thought of this quiz. I put its questions to ChatGPT to see how it did. The point of the exercise is that these ..read more

The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of Feburary 2024, is now online at Fractal Kitty. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information ..read more

Here’s some mathematical news we didn’t otherwise cover this month. A collaborative project involving Dennis Gaitsgory and several pals claim they are compiling a proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture, consisting of a series of papers. (via Anton Hilado) It’s been announced that all European Mathematical Society journals will be diamond open access in 2024. It follows their Subscribe To Open programme, and means that “for the first time the [EMS] Press’s annual journal output will be entirely open access, with a blend of S2O and Diamond publications”. Maths history news: it’s been makin ..read more

The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of January 2024, is now online at CavMaths. The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information ..read more