Twelve months ago, when I was listening to Mike Askew's Presidential Address, my emotions were divided between thoroughly enjoying his presentation and a growing sense of trepidation that it was my turn next! The time seems to have passed very quickly and I'm somewhat nervous, but incredibly honoured, to take the helm as we explore “the case for mathematical fluency”.

John Horton Conway lived to discover the Mathematics behind problems, always working to isolate a pure, essential kernel of truth. He loved to communicate these simple truths to others, often changing the way they thought. Everything John touched turned to Mathematics, and to very beautiful Mathematics. John was generous with his mathematical riches; he gave them to everyone that showed interest — whether at the coffee house, at the sushi restaurant, or in Mathematics departments. He was a magnet for all mathematicians, and he welcomed all who came to him. John would find a way to start with some simple calculation, a game or puzzle and turn it into whatever he wanted to explain. John often chose problems about games and recreational topics, but the insights he derived changed our understanding of several very serious branches of Mathematics.

In 1942 R. C. Lyness challenged readers of the Gazette to find a recurrence relation of order 2 which would generate a cycle of period 7 for almost all initial values [1].

Calculus students are taught that an indefinite integral is defined only up to an additive constant, and as a consequence generations of students have assiduously added ‘+C’ to their calculus homework. Although ubiquitous, these constants rarely garner much attention, and typically loiter without intent around the ends of equations, feeling neglected. There is, however, useful work they can do, work which is particularly relevant in the contexts of integral tables and computer algebra systems. We begin, therefore, with a discussion of the context, before returning to coax the constants out of the shadows and assign them their tasks.

The National Archery in the Schools Program (NASP) began in Kentucky, USA in 2002 and has rapidly expanded to thousands of students around the United States. The program teaches archery in physical education classes and organises tournaments for student archers in elementary school and high school. The program goals include improving student motivation, attention, behaviour, attendance and focus, as well as introducing students to an outdoor skill with the hope that this may increase attention to wildlife conservation efforts in the future.

Probability and expectation are two distinct measures, both of which can be used to indicate the likelihood of certain events. However, expectation values, which are often associated with waiting times for success, may, at times, speak more clearly and poignantly about the uncertainty of an event than a theoretical probability. To illustrate the point, suppose the probability of choosing a winning lottery ticket is 2.5 × 10−8. This information may not communicate the unlikely odds of winning as clearly as a statement like, “If five lottery tickets are purchased per day, the expected waiting time for a first win is about 22000 years.”

There is a rich and seemingly endless source of definite integrals that can be equated to or expressed in terms of Catalan's constant. Denoted by G and defined by

$${\rm{G}} = \sum\limits_{n = 0}^\infty {{{{{\left( { - 1} \right)}^n}} \over {{{\left( {2n + 1} \right)}^2}}} = 1 - {1 \over {{3^2}}} + {1 \over {{5^2}}} \ldots = 0.915\,965\,594 \ldots \,\,,} $$

In [1] the second author observed that it is possible to have a binary operation * on a set X with the property that two different arrangements of brackets in a given combination x1 * … * xn of elements of X yield the same outcome for all choices of the xj. For example, for the operation of subtraction on the set of real numbers, we have

$$\left[ {a - \left( {b - c} \right)} \right] - d = a - \left[ {b - \left( {c - d} \right)} \right]$$

This article is motivated by, and is meant as a supplement to, the recent paper [1]. That paper proves three geometric characterisations of triangles whose sides are in arithmetic progression, or equivalently triangles in which one of the sides is the arithmetic mean of the other two. More precisely, it gives three geometric contexts in which such triangles appear. In this Article, we supply references for the results in [1] and we provide more proofs of these results. We also add more contexts in which such triangles appear, and we raise related issues for future work. We hope that this will be a source of problems for training for, and for including in, mathematical competitions.

A famous theorem of Weierstrass, dating from 1885, states that any continuous function can be uniformly approximated by polynomials on a bounded, closed real interval.

To live to a ripe old age, untroubled by health problems, physical or mental, is an almost universal aspiration. But most people are not so lucky and will likely be in care homes for their final years, with varying levels of disease, disability and dementia. Kinley et al [1] maintain that over a fifth of the population of developed countries die in care homes. Moreover, the financial cost of this end of life care, which is the focus of this paper, can be daunting and require much planning [2]. It was reported in 2017 that, in the UK, care home costs are rising up to twice as fast as inflation [3]. Consequently the question arises about the long term affordability of such care to those having to fund it, a question that ever more people both nationally and globally are having to confront.