Normal service should resume…

… very soon hopefully!

I’ve had a couple of people asking why nothing has been posted in a while, I’m currently slap bang in the middle of writing up my Masters Thesis and it’s (obviously) pretty time consuming. I’m hoping to start writing more regularly here as soon as it’s done and dusted.

See everyone on the otherside!

Happy Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day everyone!

The Triangular Lodge

Due to my laziness as a blogger (and due to me moving house today) again I’m bringing you a blog post that I made a few months ago in my old blog because I thought it was worth a mention. It isn’t a particularly mathematical blog, more of a historical and symmetrical blog, but I still thought it was worth a mention as it’s one of my favourite places in England.

The Triangular Lodge is a building just outside the tiny village of Rushton in Northamptonshire. It was built by a man called Thomas Tresham in 1593 as a tribute to his faith. Everything has hidden meaning and is all based around the number three, the main reasoning being to represent the holy trinity: the father, the son and the holy ghost, other reasons being a pun on the family name “Tresam” meaning three in Latin and several trefoils on the family’s coat of arms to name a few. The building is coated in symbolism from the bible, with verses written across the doors and under the gables in Latin, and each gable representing other scenes from the bible.

Although the majority of the symbolism has been explained, some parts still remain a mystery to this day.

It’s a stunning building, completely different to anything I’ve ever seen. Well worth a look if you’re in the area! Below are some shots I took of various bits on the building.

  

For more information and details of how to find the lodge see English Heritage and The Heritage Trail.

The Mathematical Atlas

I’ve added a bit of a hardcore link today so brace yourselves!

The mathematical atlas is a site that contains information on all the modern areas of mathematics that are studied in dark, tea/coffee fuelled, tweed, cordoroy and elbow-pad infested research institutions around the world. There is a guide for newcomers at the bottom of the page that will give you a nice round introduction to our world, and for the more brave amongst you, the rainbow links on the right of the page go straight in for the jugular! I would say I was a 20, 05 with a handful of 68 (if you’re interested).

The Mathematical Atlas

Persi Diaconis

I originally posted about this over a year ago on my old blog, but I thought I’d slowly transfer over some of the material as I’m a bit lazy (plus there are some real gems on there). The first up for transfer is a short bit about Persi Diaconis, a very interesting Mathemagician, excuse the ”Good Will Hunting” reference.

Diaconis isn’t your typical Mathematician. At the age of 14 he ran away from home to join travelling magician on his tours and at the age of 17 he was grassing up Carribean casinos for using shaved dice. Today Diaconis is a Professor at Stanford having written about a number of interesting statistical problems involving cards, bias dice and coin flipping.

He showed that a flipped coin always lands on the side that it started on. Having grown up with magic, his thumb was trained so well that he could force a coin to land on heads 10 out of 10 flips. Give the coin to your average Joe and 51% of the time the coin will land on the side it started on.

Also, he showed that if you do 7 riffle-shuffles to an ordinary pack of cards that’s enough to randomise the deck. Doing it 8 times doesn’t really increase the level of randomness in the deck, but 7 is enough for the average person. For a trained casino dealer if they do 8 perfect riffle-shuffles the pack returns to its original state.

For more information on Persi Diaconis head on over to any of the following links:

Stanford News Service

Radio 4’s Another 5 Numbers