News from the world of Maths
|
February 17, 2013
Science advisors to government are an embattled lot. Remember the l'Alquila earthquake debacle or David Nutt's stance on drugs which cost him his job. Bridging the gap between politics and science isn't easy. Politicians like clear messages but science, and the reality it tries to describe, is rarely clear-cut. |
February 16, 2013
Sequences of numbers can have limits. For example, the sequence 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, ... has the limit 0 and the sequence 0, 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, ... has the limit 1. But not all number sequences behave so nicely. Can we still discern some sort of limiting behaviour? |
|
February 13, 2013
An infinite set is called countable if you can count it. In
other words, it's called countable if you can put its members into
one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, ... .
|
February 11, 2013
Yesterday we opened the Plus New York office, amidst snow covered streets at the foot of the Empire State building. |
|
February 7, 2013
On 14 March at 1.59pm GMT, Marcus du Sautoy will host Pi Day Live, an interactive exploration of the number which has fascinated mathematicians throughout the ages. He wants to rediscover pi using ancient and intriguing techniques, and he needs your help! |
February 7, 2013
They've done it again! GIMPS has discovered the largest known prime number: 257,885,161-1. This massive 17,425,170 digit number was discovered thanks to clever distributed computing software that uses idle computer time donated by volunteers. |
|
February 5, 2013
How would you go about adding up all the integers from 1 to 100? Tap them into a calculator? Write a little computer code? Or look up the general formula for summing integers? |
January 31, 2013
Sometimes you just can't argue with the evidence. If a large sample of |
