The Aperiodical

As part of our special Apéry takeover today, I chatted to mathematicians Ben Sparks and James Grime, to find out what we know about the mathematics Apéry did – it’s an enjoyable 10-minute listen.

Cushing was injured in a serious maths accident recently (he fell out of the bath ) so I wanted to assess the damage to his number-wrangling faculties. Fortunately, there’s the National Numeracy Challenge , which begins with a test to pinpoint your weak areas.  National Numeracy is a charity that wants every adult in the UK to “reach a level of numeracy skills that allow them to meet t...

MathsJam is an annual conference in the UK, and a monthly night in pubs around the world, organised respectively by mathematician and juggler Colin Wright , and stand-up mathematician Matt Parker . We cornered Matt and Colin at the MathsJam conference last November, and talked to them for just over half an hour about the conference, the pub nights, and a disturbing amount about cake. Here are some...

David and I sat down again and talked about maths a bit more. I’m calling this number 1 because it suits both our counting systems: David can call this the first podcast of a new series, and I can say the one we put out under  All Squared was number 0. Everyone wins! Here follows a long rambly list of things we talked about, and some things we alluded to too. The button to actually play the...

We haven’t done one of these for absolutely ages. Since all three of us were at the big MathsJam conference a couple of weekends ago, we decided to introduce a local minimum into the fun curve by sitting down and talking about how this site’s doing. Actually, we ended up talking about the MathsJam baking competition  for absolutely ages. When we got round to talking about the site, we...

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 li...

We have an unusual All Squared podcast for you this time. My good friend David Cushing  has been asking to do a podcast for absolutely ages. We couldn’t decide on a single topic to talk about, so instead I suggested we just sit down and chat about maths in general, like we do when there isn’t a microphone in front of us. We talked for about an hour and a half, but because I’m com...

This is the second and final part of our interview with Colm Mulcahy. Last week we talked about card magic ; in this part we moved on to the subject of Martin Gardner and the gatherings of interesting people associated with his name. We’ve tacked on some blather we recorded about the British Science Festival in Newcastle to the end of this podcast. Listen in to hear what we think about maths...

Colm Mulcahy is an original Aperiodical contributor (Aperiodicontributor?) and friend of the site. He’s spent the last year and a bit writing his new book,  Mathematical Card Magic: Fifty-Two New Effects . It came out a few weeks ago, so we thought it was a good opportunity to talk to him and find out just what’s so great about mathematical magic tricks. Actually, we had that thought q...

This number of the All Squared podcast contains the final third of our interview with the inestimable David Singmaster, and then a bit from CP about his favourite book, “ A treatise on practical arithmetic, with book-keeping by single entry “, by William Tinwell. The first part of the interview, and plenty of links to go with it, were in Number 5 of the podcast . Here are some links to...

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 ofte...

It’s a repeat booking for the Festival of the Spoken Nerd in number 4 (or 16 if you belong to Team All Squared) of our podcast. Standup mathematician Matt Parker joined us to talk about  interesting coincidences . Here are some links to the things we referred to in the podcast, along with some bonus extras: The operator precedence problem that makes Katie want to cry Colin Wright has blogged...

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...

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...

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 c...

Two days late, because that is the way we rotate here, it’s another episode of our sporadic navel-gazing podcast. In this episode we talked about: Our piece on the  Invariant Subspace Problem (and the  more recent news ) Log-log! Who’s there? Not a power law! Our coverage of the new Mersenne Prime news , and our meta-coverage of everyone else’s coverage of it The good, the bad, and Gow...

After two months we’ve finally done another podcast! We completely forgot even the most rudimentary things about how to do a podcast. Sorry. In this episode, we talked about: Mathematical Christmas cracker jokes Fractal Christmas trees Posts from MathsJam speakers – Tom Button on Radii of Polyhedra and Phil Harvey on AS Results and Batting Averages The Aperiodical’s Mathematical...

We took the opportunity of us all being in the same small slice of space and time (MathsJam, last weekend) to record another episode of our continuing audio part-work, The Aperiodcast. We talked about: Christian’s Recreational Maths Seminar Dara O Briain: School of Hard Sums to return; maths students sought to take part Matt Parker’s Twitter Puzzle – 12th Nov John McKenna’s helpful com...

Here’s another episode of our irregular podcast about what’s been happening on the site. This time, we talked about: Advances in pure nonsense Robert Schneider, Mathematical Musician/Musical Mathematician #MTT2K: Teachers critique Khan Academy Surds: what are they good for? Calculus of the Nervous System The new fonts on the site Christian’s new Aperiodical Round Up and Interesti...

Leaves are falling, a chilly wind is blowing and I can hear the distant thunder of undergrads’ hooves as they stampede towards my department. Yes, Summer is giving way to Autumn, so it’s time for another Aperiodcast. If you had “42 days” in the “when will the next Aperiodcast appear” sweepstake, report to the comments section below for your prize. In this episod...

Here’s the fifth Aperiodcast, covering what’s happened on the site basically since the start of Summer. Peter is busy doing work, so it was just Katie and me blathering on about a variety of things. The posts discussed in this episode were: Telegraph’s open letter to Michael Gove and Vince Cable on numeracy (presented with arithmetic errors) , by Peter More and Less , by Paul Taylor In...

Here’s another Aperiodcast, covering things that happened on the site between the 4th and the 20th of June. Posts discussed in this episode Ask a mathematician: “Where should we live?” by Alistair Bird The mathematics examinations faced by school leavers in the Republic of Ireland  by Colm Mulcahy P-Value Extravaganza posted by Christian The Super Subtraction Feat by Colin Beveridge Take par...

After an unexpectedly long wait of over three weeks, here’s the third Aperiodcast, discussing what’s happened on the site between 13/5/2012 and 3/6/2012. You’ll notice that we recorded this podcast four days ago – we were all having too much jubilee fun to find time to upload it! Anyway, we had lots to talk about, so please do have a listen. Posts discussed in this episode:...

In true Aperiodical fashion, we left 13 days before recording another Aperiodcast, so here’s what we think about the last almost-two-weeks on the site. We talked about: “Futurama theorem” slightly improved The number line is not an intuitive concept Grow Your Own Food Puzzlebomb – May 2012 Carnival of Mathematics 86 Charlotte Hillebrand’s post with some nice comments about our endeavou...

Here’s the very first edition of what we’ve cleverly decided to call The Aperiodcast. The plan is to record a short podcast every week or week-and-a-bit (this is the Aperiodical after all) talking about what’s been happening on the site, and pointing out posts that we found particularly interesting or have generated a lot of discussion. Subscribe to get future episodes of the Ape...