I never read Martin Gardner’s column in Scientific American. This doesn’t mean that I was not influenced by Martin Gardner. The work that he did to popularize mathematics has left indelible marks on my life, as I would not have had the teachers I had, or the interview subjects on SCC, without it. Therefore I was very sad to hear that he past away yesterday, and I will leave you hear with this video of Martin:

The Nature of Things / Martin Gardner from Wagner Brenner on Vimeo.

Alex Bellos author of Alice’s Adventures in Numberland and twitterer extraordinaire has posted up this video illustrating a wonderful visual method of multiplying numbers. I had not heard of this method but I might just start to use it for large numbers.  (via maanow)

Way, way back in the early days of Combinations and Permutations, epsiode 2 particularly, we discussed mathematics and its appearences in popular culture. I knew at the time we would miss whole swaths of instances and now thanks to Oliver Knill from Harvard I have proof. Knill has put together an amazing collection of Math in Movies, which I swear I will link to at least one more time before this is over, complete with clips from many movies. Here is an example of Math in Movies, there is that last link, from Monty Python’s Flying Circus we have Leibniz in Goal and Archimedes as Striker:

Make sure to check out the rest of the videos on Knill’s site, got even one more link in right here, to see just what we missed.

The Mathematics Genealogy Project, Mitch Keller Managing Director, has long been one of the favorite time wasters for mathematicians on the internet. Just type in the name of your teacher, advisor, or yourself, if you are a PhD, and you will be able to track back, through the advisor-student relationship, all the way until the records run out and probably find yourself admist such luminaries as Gauss, Bernoulli, and Leibniz. Well over at thatismathematics they have used the data from the Mathematics Genealogy Project to put together a brand new service: Mathematical Relationship Search. Just input the names of two mathematicians and voila, you could find out, like I did, that your advisor is the sixth cousin six times removed of Carl Frederich Gauss.

Watch Marcus Dusautoy and other discuss Zero and Infinity. The more great maths videos and articles that come from England the more I want to be a part of that scene.

Thank you to DoctorWho over on the forum for the link to this delightful video.

Tom and Nick over at Math for Primates, fantastic podcast that you should be listening to, have a much better explanation of Pi than Combinations and Permutations will ever be able to do:

In this podcast:

• Tom and Nick are not as happy with Pi Day as you’d expect.
• Why do Hippies like Pi so much?
• Where does pi come from, and why do we care?
• Is mounting a Ferris Wheel on a Flat-Bed Truck a good idea?
• How many digits of pi can YOU recite?  I’ll bet not 69,000!
• Nick and Tom give you back 23 hours and 40 minutes of your life … ish

Math for Primates Blog Post

A day after PI day I bring to you a world without PI at all

Thanks a lot to Combinations and Permutations contributor Cody Palmer for the link to this fun math site. Check out what equation your name creates. (LINK)

Everyone has been posting abouit this but I have to put my 2 cents in the ring. Number Gossip is awesome. That is it, really my whole 2 cents. It is simply an awesome site that gives awesome info about any integer between 0 and 9999. Try it out, have fun with it. We just recorded episode 37 of C&P, which should be up Thursday night, and in honor of that here is what Number Gossip says about 37:

• 37 is the smallest irregular prime (submitted by Andy Baker and John Kiehl)
• 37 is the smallest left and right truncatable prime having more than one digit
• 37 is the only prime with period length three: 1/37 = 0.027 027 027 …
• 37 is the prime you get if a three digit number having the same digits is divided by its digit sum