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Shoes and partition numbers: a developing mathematical mind wanders
Does this picture make you think of Srinvasa Ramanujan? I’m always fascinated by the pace and range of little conversations with my seven-year-old son that wander in and out of maths. Let me tell you...
View Article27 tickets that guarantee a win on the UK National Lottery – but what prize?
The recent preprint ‘You need 27 tickets to guarantee a win on the UK National Lottery‘ by David Cushing and David I. Stewart presents a list of 27 lottery tickets which will guarantee to match at...
View ArticleBouton numbers: a new integer sequence
In the 1901 paper that named the game Nim and provided its mathematical analysis, Charles Bouton defined “safe combinations”, positions that if you leave the game in this state, your opponent cannot...
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A visit to The Mathematikum in Giessen
My son and I visited The Mathematikum in Giessen. This is well worth a visit, we did it as a day trip by train from holiday in Frankfurt, which worked well because the museum is close to the railway...
View ArticleMathematical modelling and sustainability
I was interviewed by Nira Chamberlain, President of the Mathematical Association. I am the twelfth person to whom he has asked his question “what is the point of mathematics?” Hoping to offer...
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Announcing The Finite Group
“Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place where maths people could hang out and create cool maths things?” This idea was put to me a couple of years ago, and has stuck with me. It does sound nice....
View ArticlePrimes, reversals and concatenations
In the last Finite Group livestream, Katie told us about emirps. If a number p is prime, and reversing its digits is also prime, the reversal is an emirp (‘prime’ backwards, geddit?). For example, 13,...
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ChatGPT and history of maths misconceptions
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...
View ArticlePrime-generating functions
A few weeks ago I heard someone casually refer to ‘that formula of Euler’s that generates primes’. I hadn’t heard of this, but it turns out that in 1772 Euler produced this formula: \[ f(x) = x^2 + x...
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Matrix multiplication doesn’t work like that
Earlier this week I posted a matrix multiplication worksheet on Mastodon. If you do some of these, you might spot what’s funny about them. For example. \[ \Large \begin{bmatrix}\color{navy}{4} &...
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