All Squared

Remember, remember,
The fourteenth of March.

While the previous number of All Squared failed to achieve topicality by appearing several weeks after the event it was about, this time we’ve hit the nail bang on the head with a podcast all about π day... on π day!

We chatted to Festival of the Spoken Nerd’s Steve Mould about remembering π – how much can you memorise; how much should you memorise; and if you really insist on memorising it, what’s the best way to do it?

Here are some links to the things we referred to in the podcast, along with some bonus extras:

• The number of this episode is 3, which is exactly π if you don’t think very hard when you read the Bible
• A chronology of the computation of π
• Epic π quest sets 10 trillion digit record, at New Scientist
• Download 4 million digits of π
• “Using pi calculated out to only 39 decimal places would allow one to compute the circumference of the entire universe to the accuracy of less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom.“
• The π Code – π in base 26 ≈ D.DRSQLOL
• 33,333 digits of π in base-(the 1000 most common words in the English language)
• Japanese breaks pi memory record on BBC News (in which “Conventionally, 3.14159 is used as pi.”)
• Japanese man claims new record for memorising ‘pi’ at the Daily Mail (in which “It is usually written out to a maximum of three decimal places, as 3.141, in math textbooks.”)
• Akira Haraguchi
• The official world record for memorising π is held by Chao Lu of China, who memorised 67,890 decimal digits.
• Kolmogorov complexity (Steve had the definition right – it measures just the length of the description of the thing, and doesn’t measure the resources required to interpret that description)
• Normal number
• Find your birthday in π
• Find any string of digits in π
• Michael Hogg’s method of memorising 100 digits of π
• Joshua Foer: Moonwalking with Einstein – a talk about a book about memory
• Irrational sonnets (where the stanzas have 3,1,4,1,5 lines) in French, or in English
• A mnemonic for π which is also a pangram, in French
• Previously on The Aperiodical: Random walks on π, a marvellous visualisation of the digits of π.
• Circular reasoning: who first proved that $C/d$ is a constant? – a historical essay by David Richeson.
• While Steve was chatting to us, his collaborator Matt Parker was measuring π with pies for Numberphile.

Steve Mould has his fingers in, if you’ll excuse one final pun, many pies. Here are some links to some of his projects you might find interesting:

• Steve’s homepage
• Festival of the Spoken Nerd
• Maths Gear
• Steve’s on Twitter

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.

Here are some links to the things we referred to, along with some further reading. Since we found so many nonsense formula stories, I’ll split the links into two sections: nonsense and the rest.

Nonsense formula stories

• Flipping clever! Formula for the perfect pancake revealed by maths boffins (but we’ll still end up with ours stuck to the ceiling) – Daily Mail (2013)
• The perfect pancake? Easy, just follow this formula ... 100 – [10L – 7F + C(k – C) + T(m – T)]/(S – E) – Daily Mail (2009); the one with the amazing stock photo
• Formula for perfect pancake unveiled by scientists – The Telegraph (2009)
• How to toss the perfect pancake – Daily Express; the one without the actual formula
• The perfect pancake toss – Shortlist; includes the formula
• Why today’s the perfect day to change your life – Daily Mail
• Revealed: The formula for a perfect family Christmas – drink two parts wine for every three chocolates – Daily Mail
• Scientists are serious about having a laugh – The Telegraph
• Scientists reveal formula for the perfect sitcom – The Telegraph
• Horror’s perfect formula – London Evening Standard; the one where “blood and guts” = $\sin x$.
• Here’s my happy marriage secret: avoid romance – The Telegraph
• The formula for perfect parking – NPR

The rest

• The geometry of perfect parking – Simon Blackburn; PDF
• The Tommy Westphall universe
• Jewish Problems – Tanya Khovanova’s collection of Russian “coffin” problems on the arXiv, including number 1’s quickly-read puzzle.
• Mathematical Puzzles, a Connoisseur’s Collection, by Peter Winkler
• The Muddy Children: a logic for public announcement – slides by Jesse Hughes
• CP’s Interesting Esoterica collection

Number 3 will appear in exactly 9 days. You can probably guess what it’ll be about. But can you guess who we’ll be talking to?

You can subscribe to All Squared through our RSS feed. We’ll set up an iTunes thing if anyone asks for it.

We’ve been quietly making plans and gathering material for a new project over the past couple of weeks, after noticing that there’s an unusual paucity of maths podcasts at the moment. Well, that exciting new project is now happening, and it’s a half-hour podcast featuring maths, guests, puzzles and links from the internet. It’s called All Squared, and it’ll contain cringe-inducing intro/ending contrivances, interesting guest interviews on topical and other subjects, and a panoply of mathematical curiosities.

This is the first number of the podcast (we thought ‘episode’ would set unrealistic expectations of regularity, and we can never resist a pun). It includes an interview with Edmund Harriss about spoken mathematics, as well as a puzzle which we’ll give the answer to in the next number, and a great mathematical flash game to keep you occupied until that appears.

Here are some links to the things we referred to, along with some further reading:

• Mathematics Out Loud at Maxwell’s Demon, Edmund’s blog
• Milton’s Paradise Lost (Project Gutenberg ebook version)
• The Pythagorean Proposition, a book containing nearly 370 proofs
• The proof of Pythagoras’ theorem that Katie gave
• Pythagorean Theorem poem
• Maths Poetry at Mr P’s Maths Page
• Gunfight at the cubic corral – Thony Christie on Cardano, Tartaglia and 16th Century maths competitions
• The same topic at The Story of Mathematics
• CP’s proof without words on YouTube
• Edmund says Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups by John Conway is particularly readable.
• Z-Rox, the dimensionally deficient game, at Kongregate

Number 2 (or should it be 4?) will appear soonish.

Good maths books are simultaneously plentiful and rare. While there are a few classics almost everyone knows about and has copies of (Gardner, Hardy, etc.), the trade in lesser-known maths books is considerably less well-organised. Very few bookshops have well-stocked maths sections, and insipid pop maths books dominate. Unless you hear about a good maths book through word of mouth, you’ll often only encounter it once it’s ended up in a second-hand bookshop, usually a refugee from an emptied maths department library.

But books, more than anything else, are where the beauty of maths really manifests itself. It’s where ideas are presented most clearly, after they’ve had time to percolate through a few more brains. We talked to David Singmaster, professor of maths and metagrobologist, about his favourite maths books.

Here are some links to the things we referred to in the podcast, along with some bonus extras:

• The Slocum Puzzle Collection at Indiana University
• Luca Pacioli on Wikipedia
• Scans of the manuscript of De Viribus Quantitatis
• The Conjuring Arts Research Center’s edition of De Viribus Quantitatis
• The one pile game (Static Nim)
• Nim on Wikipedia
• Nimber on Wikipedia
• Nim Multiplication by Lenstra (link goes to a big PDF)
• The game that wasn’t solved was Sprouts, which is analysed using nimbers in Computer analysis of Sprouts with nimbers by Lemoine and Viennot
• Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays by Berlekamp, Conway and Guy
• Melancholia by Albrecht Dürer at the British Museum (it’s also the icon for our Arty Maths section over there on the right!)
• The Blind Abbess and her Nuns at The Puzzle Museum
• The vertical-horizontal illusion at Wikipedia
• George Hart’s page on De Divina Proportione (and one on Leonardo da Vinci’s illustrations)
• Scans of De Divina Proportione at archive.org
• The drawings CP was thinking of were from the Codex Guelf, and posted at BibliOdyssey.
• Between 1981 and 1985 David edited and published Cubic Circular. With David’s permission, Jaap Scherphuis has put every issue online.

CP recommends Westwood Books in Sedbergh and Barter Books in Alnwick as sources of unusual second-hand maths books. The chap who runs Westwood is an ex-mathematician and does a good job of saving books being thrown out of university libraries.

Part 2 will appear next week.

Evelyn Lamb is a professional mathematician who has taken up journalism on the side. She received the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship last year, and spent the summer writing for the magazine Scientific American. We talked to her about maths journalism, the challenges involved in making advances accessible to a wider audience, and the differences between blogging and print journalism.

Here are some links to go with the things we talked about:

• AAAS Mass Media Fellowship
• Evelyn Lamb.
• Evelyn on Twitter.
• Roots of Unity, Evelyn’s blog at Scientific American.
• The AMS Blog on Maths Blogs, edited by Evelyn Lamb and Brie Finegold.
• Solved? 80-year-old puzzle of the infinite sphere, New Scientist‘s coverage of last year’s invariant subspace ‘proof’.
• Adam Goucher’s blog, Complex Projective 4-Space.
• Evelyn’s Carnival of Maths post.