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Monthly Archives: March 2012
A brief hiatus and some more holiday reading
DoF will be on hiatus for a couple of weeks while the editorial team enjoy their two-week break from teaching. Updates will resume on Monday 16 April. In the mean time, here’s another little budget of maths-related articles and oddities … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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A fallacy with phones
Here’s a modern version of a problem I first encountered in one of Martin Gardner’s engrossing little books…
Posted in Puzzles
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Who wants to do a doctorate?
For those of you who are thinking — vaguely or seriously — about postgraduate study, here are some thoughts from a recent and from a less recent PhD student…
Posted in Articles
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The other Edinburgh Festival
If you’re looking for entertainment during the spring break and don’t mind a quick trip down the M8, it might be worth checking out the programme for the Edinburgh International Science Festival, which runs from 30 March to 15 April.
Posted in Events
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Quotation for the week: Descartes
What I found liberating about university mathematics, after years of the school variety, was that suddenly it became less important to memorise (for example) hundreds of trig formulae than to understand how to derive them. It’s nice to know that … Continue reading
Posted in Quotations
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Alexandre Grothendieck: a visitation
The letter “G” abounds in great mathematicians: Gauss, Galois and Gödel being only the standard-bearers; we also have Germain, Grassmann, Green and Gromov, all worthy of an entry in the abecedary. I, however have chosen to write about Grothendieck, which … Continue reading
Posted in A mathematical abecedary
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Quotation for the week: Russell
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), logician, anti-war campaigner and the only mathematician so far to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, was rather fond of expressing himself paradoxically. Here’s one of his more famous statements. Mathematics may be defined as … Continue reading
Posted in Quotations
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A little irrationality for Pi Day
Those of you who are sufficiently geeky will probably already know that today, March 14, is “Pi Day”. Those of you who are regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to discover that we’re treating this as an excuse … Continue reading
Quotation for the week: Littlewood
J. E. Littlewood’s book A Mathematician’s Miscellany (1953) contains quite a few remarks that don’t do much for the image of mathematics, accurate though they may be. Here’s one of them. Improbabilities are apt to be overestimated. It is true that I … Continue reading
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A museum of mathematics?
Here’s a thought. Many major cities these days have a science museum or “exploratory” of some kind, like Glasgow’s own Science Centre or Edinburgh’s Dynamic Earth. Why not a museum devoted to mathematics? Recently there’s been a project launched in … Continue reading
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Degree of Freedom 