The usual busyness at the end of the teaching term and a holiday last week have meant that I’ve not been posting for a while. Today’s post is a short one from me directing you to a fairly long post by Stephen Wolfram on his recent visit to the Leibniz archive in Hannover. Read it...

I never miss a chance to rummage around in second-hand book shops. My wife, who is not from this country, is often not pleased as the books are usually somewhat battered and she calls them “dirty books” not realising that this means something different in English. In the past...

Recently, an acquaintance from my days as a researcher at Liverpool University alerted me to the existence of the Museum of Mathematics in New York. My acquaintance, Janet West, was a PhD student when I was at Liverpool and is now involved in the museum. There’s plenty of stuff online...

Mary Cartwright is fairly well-known amongst mathematicians in the UK but less widely known amongst the general public. A recent BBC online article about her and her work may be the beginning of a change in this situation. There is even a Radio 4...

Here’s a really good introduction to estimating numbers and includes Enrico Fermi‘s famous “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” You can see more like this at...

This is mainly one for those local to Leeds (although see the bottom of the post). As part of the Leeds Festival of Science, Matt Parker will be giving a talk at the University. From the advertising: Direct from BBC Radio 4’s Infinite Monkey Cage with Brian Cox and Robin Ince, with research...

I’m not a big user of twitter as I prefer to read material that has more than 140 characters. Nonetheless, often something interesting appears. Dan Meyer set off an intriguing set of responses to his call for maths problems that can be posed within Twitter constraints. The results can be...

Rock music fans are aware of the phenomenon of the mosh pit at concerts — a riotous area, usually close to the stage, where concert-goers, in lieu of learning complicated dance steps, slam violently into each other (and hence an alternative name for moshing is slam dancing). Until now...

3D printing seems to have some sort of turning point in the last few months. Lots of people know what it is and many are experimenting with it. This week I began teaching on my History of Mathematics module; yesterday’s lecture was about Archimedes. I would never imagined that the two...

Obviously the first post of the year should be a serious one about the year ahead, New Year’s resolutions and such. Not this time. This time I urge you to have a look at the mathematics of Lego via Wired. Read the article here. To be honest I’m not sure if this really is a good...

It’s the end of the year. It seems only like yesterday we were all saying “What? I can’t believe it’s the end of January already”. So what was the year like? I feel I’ve had a good year – I’ve been having a lot of fun trying to understand...

Nate Silver has come to prominence recently through the seemingly simple method of predicting election results through statistics. I’ve just finished reading his book, The Signal and the Noise and it’s certainly one of my favourite books of the year. It covers all sorts of...

I follow a number of education writers and those who write about learning. One of these, Scott Young, is a high achieving recent graduate who seems to be making a living by giving learning advice. His latest claim to fame is his MIT Challenge where he studied a complete 4-year MIT course in...