Christian Lawson-Perfect
996 followers -
Mathematician, koala fan, Aperiodical triumvir
Mathematician, koala fan, Aperiodical triumvir

996 followers
Posts
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Boring maths education question: is there a comprehensive taxonomy of topics in maths up to undergrad level? The mathcentre one (http://www.mathcentre.ac.uk/types/community-project/taxonomy/) is very spotty.
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I've navigated the maze of my employer's purchase requisition forms to book my place at the Talking Maths in Public conference in September.
If you're interested in that kind of thing and can get to Bath, I recommend you do!
http://www.talkingmathsinpublic.uk/
Talking Maths In Public
talkingmathsinpublic.uk
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@jherzli writes, on https://mathstodon.xyz/ :

"According to Augustus De Morgan (quoted in "A Long Way from Euclid" by Constance Reid), Euclidean ruler-and-compass constructions (based on lines and circles) should have included helices."

"The elementary geometry of points, lines, and circles is very different when helices are added. The former is decidable, also covered in "A Long Way from Euclid." OTOH, the latter is undecidable. It includes a model for the Peano Axioms: the intersection of a line and a helix._"

Incidentally, for those who aren't yet familiar with it: mathstodon.xyz is a social media service for mathematicians, part of the greater (and less specialized) mastodon community. You can write short posts (500 characters, not as much as Google+ but much longer than twitter) with links, embedded media, etc., repost ("boost") others' posts, etc. And on mathstodon (unlike the rest of mastodon) you can use $$...$$ to get MathJax-formatted formulas. The community there is still small, but growing, unlike Google+ which feels large but shrinking.
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Back in 2013, our own Christian Lawson-Perfect came up with a way of making a solid from the smallest non-Hamiltonian graph, the Herschel Graph. Called the Herschel Enneahedron, it’s got nine faces (three squares and six kites) and the same symmetries as…
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I'm considering running a 'hack day' style event, but I'm very unsure about some things, and I'd like to hear from anyone with experience running/attending such an event.

Context:
* we recently ran a conference on e-assessment in mathematical sciences (http://eams.ncl.ac.uk/), which showed that there are lots of people working in the area, and there are sufficiently many who don't mind travelling all the way to Newcastle to hear about it.
* I'm the lead developer of Numbas (http://www.numbas.org.uk/), an open source e-assessment system aimed at maths. At the moment, I'm the only real contributor to the code, though the system is used by hundreds of people around the world.

We have some money left over in our budget, which I thought we could use to organise an event like a hack day. At the moment, I'm the only contributor of code to the Numbas project, so my main aim is to find a way of getting more people involved.

Now, Numbas doesn't have a huge number of users - on the order of a few hundred - and I think that the users who could helpfully contribute code are a very small minority. Getting that handful of people to take part would be good but difficult, so I wonder if I could attract good coders who don't already use Numbas to the project.
My guess is that a good route in to contributing code to Numbas would be to add a self-contained feature, maybe in the form of an extension: it wouldn't need much input from me in terms of refactoring existing code, and the stakes would be low - if they fail in some way, nothing else is broken.

So I have some questions, below. I don't expect answers to any of them - whatever input you can offer, even just gut feelings, would be helpful.

- should I already have some people contributing to the project before running a hack day, or is a hack day a good way of jump-starting collaboration?
- what do we need to offer to people who attend? Will people make their own way to Newcastle or do we really need to cover travel expenses?
- would offering a list of ideas for small, self-contained projects be more attractive than a more broad pitch "in this hack day we'll work on <accessibility/marking/graphics/etc.>"?
- what can I do to attract people who aren't currently involved with Numbas? Where can I advertise the event to reach the right people? I think CS departments would be a good place to start, but how do I pitch it? These people would have to get something out of the work, so I guess it would have to be related to whatever else they're working on.
- is it worth my time trying to recruit postgrad students, or should I focus on faculty? My assumption is that contributing to an established open source project would look good on a CV and potentially provide a good project - there are quite a few features in Numbas that I reckon would make a good thesis topic.
- I feel that a single day would be too short, especially considering most people's travel times to Newcastle. What do you think is the optimal length for an event? Should I expect everyone to attend the whole time, or allow people to just attend for a portion?
- when would be the best time to run the event? Is term-time a no-no?
- outside a hack day, what can I do to be more clear about how people can contribute to Numbas? If someone asked me what they could work on, I'd look at the GitHub issues list, but that doesn't do a good job of selling the idea of contributing.

Alternately, it would also be nice just to get people together to create some high-quality material using Numbas. That would mean I potentially attract more people who wouldn't be comfortable attending a code-focused workshop, but this way I think I'm less likely to get any serious contributions to the code. Does that sound right to you?

And now I'm going to tag a few people that I think might have something helpful to say: , , , ,

If you have something to say that you don't want to put in public, please email me at numbas@ncl.ac.uk.
Jeremy Corbyn just mentioned this stat in PMQs: "In 1998, more than half of working households of people aged 16 to 34 were buying their own homes. Today, the figure is 25%."

What's the correct thing to measure here? It seems sensible to me that 16-year-olds are much less likely to buy a home than 34-year-olds, no matter the economic conditions, and "16-34" is a very wide range.
A baby boom would change this stat as the cohort come of age and get older: first it would go down, as the proportion of 16-year-olds goes up, and then it would increase as they get older and more of them buy houses.

Is there a way of normalising the data in one-year intervals, to control for a difference in the distribution of ages?