I’ve made some updates to this site.
The main change is the addition of a Twitter feed for MathsJam Portsmouth. You should be able to see our most recent posts in the right-hand sidebar. Please follow us @MathsJamPOR.
The other change is that I’ve managed to recover three older posts on this blog which had somehow got misplaced, and have restored them to their rightful place in our blog timeline.
The regular monthly meeting of Portsmouth MathsJam was held, as usual, at the King Street Tavern in Southsea. There was a welcome return for Andy, who has recently moved back to the region, and there were eight MathsJammers in total.
Most of the evening was spent trying various puzzles from a collection called Brain Busters that Jack had brought along. The puzzles were created by Ed Pegg Jr and you can find a pdf of them all at http://www.mathpuzzle.com/BrainBustersFinal.pdf
(We very much recommend Ed Pegg Jr’s site http://www.mathpuzzle.com. It has a huge collection of maths-related puzzles and links.)
Our own Edd posed this puzzle: consider two triangles with side lengths 5, 5, 6 and 5, 5, 8 respectively. What is the ratio of their areas? Before you go digging up your old book of trigonometric formulas, there is a simple way to find the solution.
Finally, we also enjoyed seeing the photos of other MathsJammers constructing cubes for the MegaMenger project. See http://megamenger.com for more information, or search @megamenger or #megamenger on Twitter for many pictures.
It’s nearly MathsJam time again. Please come and join us in the King Street Tavern from 7.30 p.m. on Tuesday, 21 October.
Portsmouth MathsJam continues to be held on the second-to-last Tuesday of each month at the King Street Tavern, with the most recent meeting held on 23 September.
It was a fairly quiet meeting with just four of us for most of the evening, though some late arrivals boosted the number to seven. Jack brought along an Only Connect-style maths quiz and we tried several puzzles from the MathsJam twitter feed and elsewhere.
Here are tweets of some of the maths puzzles we enjoyed this month:
Portsmouth MathsJam 