iamdanw / tags / mathematics

Tagged with “mathematics” (5) activity chart

  1. Adventures in Numberland

    Join author and journalist Alex Bellos for a surprising and entertaining look at the world of mathematics.

    By bringing together history, reportage and mathematical proofs, and covering subjects from adding to algebra, from set theory to statistics, and from logarithms to logical paradoxes, Alex Bellos reveals how mathematical ideas underpin just about everything in our lives.

    Join Alex Bellos at the RSA to discover the beauty of mathematical patterns in nature, the peculiar predictability of random behaviour, how to win at the casino, the deep connections between maths, religion and philosophy, and why the best Scrabble players are mathematicians.

    Speaker:Alex Bellos, writer, broadcaster and author of Futebol, the Brazilian Way of Life (Bloomsbury, 2002) and Alex’s Adventures in Numberland (Bloomsbury, 2010).

    Chair:Matthew Taylor, chief executive, RSA.

    http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2010/adventures-in-numberland

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  2. Simple as Pi

    Episode two of Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.

    Most people’s first slice of Pi is at school where it is generally made palatable as either 3.14 or the fraction 3 1/7. The memory of this number may be fuzzy for those propelled through their Maths GCSE by the power of Casio (where Pi was reduced to a button on the bottom row of the calculator), but the likelihood is they still recall that romanticised notion of a number whose decimal places randomly go on forever. At its simplest, Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. At its most complex, it is an irrational number that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers and has an apparently random decimal string of infinite length.

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  3. Codebreaking in everyday life

    Everything we buy, from books to baked beans, has a product code printed on it. More sophisticated check-digit codes exist on official documents, bank notes and air tickets. What are they for and what do they mean? We take a look at the mathematical structure of these codes and explain their purposes. And in this age of boundless surveillance, are there enough numbers for each of us to have a serial number of our own?

    Talk given by Professor John D Barrow FRS

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  4. Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Benoit Mandelbrot on the financial crisis

    As the financial sector shifts, so does the reach of the jolt to economic structures around the world. Economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his mentor, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, speak with Paul Solman about chain reactions and predicting the financial crisis.

    http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec08/psolman_10-21.html

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  5. Kepler’s Conjecture

    Episode four of Another Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.

    Johannes Kepler experimented with different ways of stacking spheres. He concluded that the "face-centred cubic lattice" was best. Using this method, Kepler calculated that the packing efficiency rose to 74%, constituting the highest efficiency you could ever get. But, how to prove it?

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    —Huffduffed by iamdanw 3 years ago