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Tagged with “numbers” (4) 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. Stephen J. Dubner | SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

    Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner spent more than two years on the New York Times Best Sellers list and sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. The book offered surprising insights into hot-button issues like cheating, crime, parenting, and class consciousness, in a compelling and readable style. Now, with SuperFreakonomics, the "rogue economist” and the award-winning journalist delve into the hidden agendas of all kinds of individuals, and the incentives that drive them. Featuring: Stephen J. Dubner is an author and journalist, formerly a writer and editor for The New York Times Magazine. The author’s Freakonomics blog on the New York Times website receives more than 1 million unique hits each month.

    http://libwww.freelibrary.org/podcast/?podcastID=452

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  4. 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