Steven Strogatz: Whi Pi Matters

Our American colleagues celebrate today Pi Day, although, technically speaking, it is American Pi Day: for the rest of the world, today is 14/03/14. A brilliant article by Steven Strogartz in The New Yorker, a brief quote:

What distinguishes pi from all other numbers is its connection to cycles. For those of us interested in the applications of mathematics to the real world, this makes pi indispensable. Whenever we think about rhythms—processes that repeat periodically, with a fixed tempo, like a pulsing heart or a planet orbiting the sun—we inevitably encounter pi. There it is in the formula for a Fourier series: […]

Cameron’s £15,000 for maths and science teachers

From BBC:

David Cameron is to announce a £15,000 university bursary for teenagers with good A-level maths and science grades, if they commit to enter teaching.

This “golden hello” for teenagers is an attempt to recruit more maths and physics teachers for England’s schools. […]

These will begin with pilot projects, with a so far unspecified number of places, which will see incentives for young people to sign up for teaching before going to university.

The £15,000 over three years for potential teachers would help with living costs and would be repayable if students did not go on to teach for three years after graduating

David Mumford on Grothendieck and magazine “Nature”

Can one explain schemes to biologists

December 14, 2014

John Tate and I were asked by Nature magazine to write an obituary for Alexander Grothendieck. Now he is a hero of mine, the person that I met most deserving of the adjective “genius”. I got to know him when he visited Harvard and John, Shurik (as he was known) and I ran a seminar on “Existence theorems”. His devotion to math, his disdain for formality and convention, his openness and what John and others call his naiveté struck a chord with me.

So John and I agreed and wrote the obituary below. Since the readership of Nature were more or less entirely made up of non-mathematicians, it seemed as though our challenge was to try to make some key parts of Grothendieck’s work accessible to such an audience. Obviously the very definition of a scheme is central to nearly all his work, and we also wanted to say something genuine about categories and cohomology. Here’s what we came up with:

Andreas Schleicher: Seven big myths about top-performing school systems

A paper by Andreas Schleicher, , at the BBC website. The list of “seven big myths”:

2. Immigrants lower results
4. Smaller class sizes raise standards
5. Comprehensive systems for fairness, academic selection for higher results
6. The digital world needs new subjects and a wider curriculum
7. Success is about being born talented

In my [AB] humble opinion,  this appears to be the case when the negations of myths are myths, too (with a possible exception of no. 7). School systems cannot, and should not, be compared without first having a close look at socio-economic, cultural, and political environments of their home countries.

Unconscious biases

From  The New York Times: Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender. By Claire Cain Miller, February 6, 2015

Male professors are brilliant, awesome and knowledgeable. Women are bossy and annoying, and beautiful or ugly.

These are a few of the results from a new interactive chart that was gaining notice on social media Friday. Benjamin Schmidt, a Northeastern University history professor, says he built the chart using data from 14 million student reviews on the Rate My Professors site. It allows you to search for any word to see how often it appeared in reviews and how it broke down by gender and department.

The chart makes vivid unconscious biases. The implications go well beyond professors and college students, to anyone who gives or receives feedback or performance reviews.

It suggests that people tend to think more highly of men than women in professional settings, praise men for the same things they criticize women for, and are more likely to focus on a woman’s appearance or personality and on a man’s skills and intelligence. […]

Studies have also shown that students can be biased against female professors. In one, teachers graded and returned papers to students at the exact same time, but when asked to rate their promptness, students gave female professors lower scores than men. Biases cut both ways — teachers have also been found to believe girls are not as good in math and science, even when they perform similarly to boys.

Ivor Grattan-Guinness obituary

From The Guardian, by Tony Crilly

Energetic historian of mathematics and logic

When Ivor Grattan-Guinness, who has died aged 73 of heart failure, became interested in the history of mathematics in the 1960s, it was an area of study widely considered to be irrelevant to mathematics proper, or something that older mathematicians did on retirement. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he found that mathematics was presented drily, with no inkling of the original motivations behind its development. So Ivor set himself the task of asking “What happened in the past?” – as opposed, he said, to taking the heritage viewpoint of asking “How did we get here?”

Ivor Owen Grattan-Guinness, historian of mathematics and logic, born 23 June 1941; died 12 December 2014

MBE to a maths clubs volunteer

From BBC:

A man who runs free maths classes for primary age children has been recognised in the New Year Honours list with an MBE.

Gbolahan Bright has been running the Bright Academy maths clubs for primary age children in London and Essex for the past 20 years.

“I have gained a lot from this society. I have been blessed and it would have been ungrateful of me if I did not give back,” he said.

Of the 500 or so children who have taken the classes, about 50 gained their GCSE while still at primary school.

Film and discussion: “Colours of Math”

The independent documentary “Colours of Math” (2012) by Ekaterina Eremenko – a German-based, American-trained, Russian-born documentary producer and mathematician – has been an unlikely runaway success.  It has been translated into 12 languages, and screened around the world.

With six mathematicians from different countries and six senses that lead them in their journey of discovery, the movie gives an insight into the mystery of abstract mathematical ideas and creative thinking.

The screening (60 min) is followed by a round table discussion. What is happening in contemporary mathematics? Are there particular national schools of thought and traditions of education? Prominent mathematicians will share their views on these questions.

Speakers:

Professor Sergey Foss, Heriot Watt University

Professor Leonid Parnovski, University College London

Professor Eugene Shargorodsky, Kings College London

Dr June Barrow-Green, Open University

The Imitation Game Cryptography Competition

From Charles Walkden, University of Manchester:

Dear all,

The Imitation Game Cryptography Competition:  www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/cryptography_competition_the_imitation_game

The Imitation Game‘ is a biopic of Alan Turing starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role (also starring Keira Knightley, Charles Dance,…) and will be released in cinemas on Nov 14th.

The film’s distributors asked us to get involved in the publicity and promotion for the film by running a one-off on-line Imitation Game Cryptography Competition‘, www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/cryptography_competition_the_imitation_game.

It’s free to enter and is open to everybody.  There are some great prizes for you to win: film posters signed by the cast, DVD bundles, soundtracks, etc,  The competition runs until 14th Nov.
Please can you spread the word to anyone and everyone (and feel free to take part yourself!).
PS:  The School’s annual `Alan Turing Cryptography Competition’ will run again from Jan 2015, with registration opening on 1st Dec.  Unlike the Imitation Game competition, this is only open to school children in Year 11 or below – but again please spread the word!
Andrew, Charles, Kees, Sebastian, Helen