Another mathematical blog and podcast

Peter Rowlett of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) has a website travelsinamathematicalworld.co.uk, featuring a blog, a regular podcast and associated show notes. Topics covered are mostly applied and applicable mathematics (which is most of mathematics, after all!) but also include monthly history and news slots, including brief biographies of famous mathematicians and snippets from mathematics on the web and in the media. Podcasts are usually around 15 minutes long and are a great way to hear about the ubiquitous presence of mathematics in modern life. After all, the media player you listen to the podcast on uses lots of mathematics: coding and signal processing for starters, and maybe graphics and encryption too, if it's your phone.

From The Times newspaper: "Ask Your Father: What's the biggest number in the world?"

A story from The Times newspaper from the 20th of June 2008, featuring some thoughts of Oxford mathematician and public-communication expert Prof. Marcus du Sautoy on how to answer the age-old problem of explaining large numbers and infinity to children.

Plus Magazine

Plus Magazine is a project of the Millennium Mathematics Project, which aims to increase the public awareness of mathematics, particularly among young people. The magazine appears four times a year and the website is updated regularly with news from the world of mathematics, together with a blog. It is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in mathematics, professionally or not.

The introduction to quantum geometry described in a recent post is from the latest edition of Plus.

An introduction to quantum geometry

Quantum geometry describes attempts to find new versions of classical geometry suited one of the major tasks in modern physics: finding a model of the universe that describes both quantum mechanics and gravity. In the linked article, this subject is introduced and explained for the non-specialist, by means of an interview with Prof. Shahn Majid, of Queen Mary, University of London, who has contributed several of the mathematical and physical ideas involved.

Note: Prof. Majid was my doctoral supervisor; my work with him was on the structure of algebraic objects related to quantum geometry, in the field colloquially known as the theory of "quantum groups".

A new mathematical celebrity: E8

Towards the end of last month, the popular media across the world covered a story about pure mathematics research. While this is not unheard of, it was rather surprising - though not in a bad way! The story in question was about a calculation carried out by a group of mathematicians, investigating the structure of an object called "E₈". (Actually, many different objects can be reasonably labelled E₈ but the one they were interested in is the split real form of the Lie group. Don't worry if you don't know what that is! The links below will help explain.)

For those interested in knowing more, I suggest starting with the original information put out by the group or the BBC's report of it. These also include some "pretty pictures" (they're mathematical, so they do mean something, rather than simply being decorative!) There's a more in-depth discussion in comments posted by John Baez and others on the n-Category Cafe blog. This is aimed at the semi-knowledgeable and could be considered a warm-up for the full technical details.

This story highlights several features of modern pure mathematical research:

• even the explicit calculations often take substantial computing power;
• the calculations provide glimpses of more general theory (they're not the end of the story, just the beginning);
• it's hard to convey in layperson's language what's actually being done (if you're not a mathematician, please don't take it personally when we say it's hard to explain!);
• sometimes you get very pretty pictures: it's all about symmetry! And finally
  
• representation theory is cool*
  

(* OK, I'm biased. But really, it is!)