The Mathematics of the Football

I gave some version of this lecture on the Mathematics of the football/soccer ball several times, in different places and in various languages. Florence 20/05/2024 Gonit Sora (online) 14/06/2021 Form their website: Gonit Sora is a multi lingual (English and Assamese) web magazine devoted to publishing well written and original articles related to science in general and mathematics in particular. One of its founders and current editor is Manjil P. Saikia, a former ICTP Diploma student, who invited me to give this online talk.

November 6, 2018

Blet

In 2018 I was invited by my former ICTP Diploma student Manjil P. Saikia to give a mini-course at the University of Vienna. I also gave then a general talk about the puzzle Blet. Later in the year I gave a Basic Notions Seminar on the puzzle at ICTP. As an experiment I got the transcript of the talk from youtube and then ran it through ChatGPT. After some light editing here is the result.

January 4, 2015

Liceo

Frequently groups of high-school students come to visit ICTP. One of their standard activities is to attend a short talk by a scientist. A number of times I gave one of these talks. In this case it was a talk for Italian students and I discussed a bit the mathematics of information transmission.

September 25, 2014

Impartial Games

I gave a the kick-off Basic Notions talk at ICTP in 2014 on Impartial Games (one of the topics of the course Math, Puzzles and Computers). I expected students in the class to connect to puzzles and eventually to the corresponding mathematics through a chilhood experience. It is certainly what happened to me while preparing the lectures. I have a somewhat vague but powerful memory of being introduced to the standard version of the game of Nim at an early age.

November 7, 2007

Puzzlemania

These are the slides of a talk I gave in the UT Odyssey public lecture series in 2007. It was a partly historical talk on the way certain puzzles seem to grab the public’s attention and become an obsession for a period of time, Rubik’s cube being a classic example of the recent past. Another wildly popular puzzle was the Famous Trick Donkeys 1858 puzzle by Sam Lloyd. The original links on the slides don’t seem to work anymore.

January 4, 2007

Saturday Morning Math Group

At UT Austin there is a wonderful program of lectures for high-school students on some Saturday mornings. I gave a number of the talks there including one about lattice polygons and the number 12.

February 21, 2001

The Millennium Problems: BSD

Part of the 2001 University of Texas Lectures on the Clay Institute Millennium Problems. On the Birch-Swinnerton–Dyer Conjecture