Tag Archives: Markov Chains

The Indisputable Santa Mathematical Advent Calendar
Day 5

Happy 5th of December!

Throughout the month, to accompany the release of our book on the Mathematics of ChristmasHannah Fry & I are tweeting out Christmathsy bits and pieces, one a day, advent calendar style. Assuming we don’t run out of ideas, that is…

day_7

Something a bit different today. As part of the research for our book, we created a two-step Markov model to analyse the Queen’s Christmas Messages and generate tweets in the same style. We’ll be tweeting these out from now until she delivers her message (When you can test how accurate we were!).

FOLLOW THE ELIZABOT HERE!

Across her 64 messages (including a written message in 1969), our Liz has actually got through a remarkably wide range of topics (with admirably little repetition, given the unvarying nature of her brief!), so don’t be surprised if the Elizabot comes out with the occasional musing on magnets, bagpipes or football.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE WHOLE CALENDAR SO FAR

Continue reading

Some very Pointless maths…

So, I’ve written an article on a mathematical sequence arising from the episodes of the BBC TV quiz show Pointless. Honestly.

Hopefully, it is written so as to be understood without any specialist knowledge at all. I have tried to keep the maths as brief and as friendly as possible.*

I have a couple more articles planned (on equally fascinating and inspirational subjects, of course), so keep an eye out for those.

‘Til soon.


*For those who are mathematically inclined, it’s about Markov chains…