On calculators in school: [[ [Truss] had an example of a question set for 11-year-olds in which a calculator was allowed: "These are some prices in a flower shop. Tulips: £1.20 for a bunch; roses: 40p each; daffodils, 55p for a bunch. How many roses can you buy for exactly £2?" ]] Lest you think she's a luddite: [[ "I was a mainstay of my school computer club, and I was happy to spend time programming in BASIC." ]]

An extract from a book about Simon Phillips Norton, mathematics, group theory, buses, riding trains, Cambridge, and community.

'“We spend all this time thinking about cities in terms of their local details, their restaurants and museums and weather,” West says. “I had this hunch that there was something more, that every city was also shaped by a set of hidden laws.”' Possibly flawed, but definitely interesting, and the NYT article sets the research in an interesting context. I'm looking forward to what comes out when he tackles companies.

I was reminded of this today on Twitter, but I don't seem to have a bookmark, so: on mathematics, with an interesting bit about how the differences in how languages render numbers affecting the speed on which we learn numeracy.

"I wondered how convincingly I could model [30 St Mary Axe] in Mathematica." Somewhat interesting stuff (although possibly more so if you note that the original buildings themselves were digitally modelled as part of the design process).

"Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years." On the Gompertz law.

Lisa Jardine's Point of View column is back, and this time it's hung off David Leavitt's new novel based on Srinivasa Ramanujan; there's a short review of his life and interesting points about maths teaching.

Insert obligatory "never start a land war in Asia" joke before noting how this is probably a much-needed post. People really don't get statistics.

"I’ve met people who don’t know the difference between a million and a billion, and don’t care. We play a lottery with ‘six ways to win!,’ overlooking the twenty million ways to lose." Lots of interesting stuff in here.

Even just scanning this I get a sense of Fourier analysis. Might come in handy.

Proper maths in Keynote. Shame about the metal window, but I can fix that.

On the Poincaré conjecture, Grigory Perelman, and Shing-Tung Yau. Long, but worth it.

I never realised there was a shortcut for multiplying with Roman numerals

270 / (18.5 * (10^6) * 15) = 9.72972973 × 10^-7 - your chances of dying in a terrorist attack on a UK-US transatlantic flight over the last fifteen years (est). That's one in a million.

Starting a series on overlooked female scientists and mathematicians with the Russian Sofia Kovalevskaya, who worked on partial derivatives and rotation (notably Saturn's rings).