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Carnival of Mathematics 88

Better late than never, here’s the 88th Carnival of Mathematics. As an editor of The Aperiodical, I’ve been press-ganged into interrupting my holiday to write this month’s edition.

Before I start with the real submissions, I think I’ll abuse this bully pulpit to link to some of my recent blogging efforts. I found each letter’s favourite words, recorded a video proving a nice fact about grids of fibonacci numbers, and wrote an Aperiodical Round Up. I also wrote a jQuery and WordPress plugin to give blog commentors instant previews of LaTeX in their comments. You can try that in the comments section here, if you’d like.

Katie Steckles has submitted a few article from the Math Goes Pop! blog: a review of the book Math Puzzles, some discussion of how you rank baseball teams, and a guest post on CNN’s light years blog about how professors’ dads made math fun. An anonymard has also sent in a piece from the same site on the half-your-age-plus-seven rule for finding a socially acceptable mate.

Alexander Bogomolny has sent in a solution to a puzzle from the 2008 Moscow Olympiad, featuring a crooked polygon.

Colm Mulcahy wrote a very interesting article for his Maths Colm on The Aperiodical, musing on the question: In what flipping dimension is a square peg in a round hole just as good as a round peg in a square hole? He has also written about the mind-bogglingly huge number of ways there are of shuffling a deck of cards.

Shecky R. has sent in a review of Gregory Chaitin’s new book, Proving Darwin, about his algorithmic information theory.

Samuel Hansen wrote a great piece on his and Peter Rowlett’s Second-Rate Minds blog about the moment that turned him “from a civilian into a mathematician”.

Andrew Taylor muses on the statistics of behindness in National Novel Writing Month.

Peter Rowlett has written on his blog Travels in a Mathematical World asking whether anniversaries are worth celebrating. A hint to how he feels might be found in the existence of the Math/Maths 100th episode/2nd birthday spectacular.

Øistein Gjøvik lets loose some toilet thoughts on learning.

Gianluigu Filippelli has written a really great article about Alan Turing’s work on morphogeenesis.

Finally, Peter Krautzbeger sent in his 11 dreams for the publishing debate.

That’s it! That’s everything I was sent this month. To submit something for next month’s Carnival, which will be hosted by Katie Steckles at The Aperiodical, visit the Carnival’s homepage.