/podcasts/wbu29.mp3

In this episode of Wrong, But Useful, @reflectivemaths and @icecolbeveridge…:

  • Argue about the inferiority of statistics
  • Give a number of the podcast: $e^{\frac{\pi}{2}} = i^i \approx 0.20788…$
  • Review @standupmaths’s excellent Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension
  • Investigate equable shapes in several dimensions, with reference to @tombutton’s MathsJam talk about the radius of a cube
  • Point to @samuel_hansen’s (and his collaborators’) work at acmescience.com; the new series of Relatively Prime is due out in January 2016. Colin likes The Other Half.
  • Threaten to hold the podcast to ransom
  • Plug Big MathsJam! We will both be there all weekend (shout out to @colinthemathmo for organising it!).
  • Plug Colin’s talk to Bournemouth Skeptics In The Pub on November 11th
  • Take off our hats to @christianp’s clerihew: Terry Tao / The cat’s miaow / Solves a conjecture / Before every lecture
  • Celebrate said Terry Tao’s solution to the Erdos Discrepancy Problem and boo Nature’s headline for it
  • Decry the lack of good arguments for learning to multiply or subtract
  • Thank some people for suggesting puzzles to Dave
  • Hand out gold stars to @chrishazell72 and @FennekLyra for work on old puzzles
  • Set a puzzle due to @npickup: There is one 3-partition of the number 3: (1,1,1). There are 3 of the number 6: (1,1,4), (1,2,3) and (2,2,2). a) Find a formula for the number of 3-partitions of any number n; b) prove it.

* Edited 2015-10-22 to fix missing audio. Thanks, Eva!