2018 in Hair (Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™)

The 2018 Members Gallery for The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists is now available to the public. Once a year, we gather the listings of all the new inductees into such a gallery – before that, new inductees are only seen individually (in the Improbable Blog) as they join throughout the year. We invite […]

I Would Code Anything for Love (but I Won’t Code That)

Taking the term “Rockstar Programmer” to a new level—well, perhaps they’re half way there?—Dylan Beattie has developed a programming language called Rockstar that allows people to live their wildest dream of writing code that resembles a 1980s rock song: Rockstar is designed for creating computer programs that are also song lyrics, and is heavily influenced by the lyrical […]

The Hairy Ball Theorem revisited – a newer, shorter, proof

Once proved, mathematical theorems* tend to stay proved. Nevertheless, they can sometimes still be improved – say, by making them shorter. Take, for example proofs for The Hairy Ball Theorem. Mathematician Henri Poincaré first drew attention to the Hairy Ball Theorem in 1885 with his treatise ‘Sur les courbes définies par les équations différentielles (III)’ Journal de […]

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