Double Maths First Thing is still confused about the ladybird.
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to find and spread joy in doing maths.
This week, I’ve been thinking about the ladybug puzzle featured on 3b1b recently. Austin Henley has simulated it, so I know the answer, and I can wave my hands at a solution, but I feel like there must be an answer From The Book.
Links
An unexpected delight: Practical Engineering on how to design a runway. I was particularly taken with the statement that each percent of downhill slope increases the stopping distance by 10% – my instinct is that that’s dimensionally weird, but might work ok for small angles.
Firmly on the “to-read” list is Rob Pike’s deep dive into accurate computation in Ivy, with asides about APL and language design.
Pavel Panchekha looks into the game theory of protest and concludes that (for rational protestors), it only happens when a successful protest is extremely valuable. I also stumbled on Suffragetto, of which there is a print-and-play version.
One thing the forces of darkness hate is art. Here’s David A. Riemann (presumably no relation) and his digital print “The Square Root of 2”, which won an award at the JMM. Also, Sam Hartburn explains how to make lovely ammonite-esque spirals with triangles and piano.
While I’m pretending not to make political points, I’ll note that the recent trend for some parliamentarians seeking politcal asylum [ sic ] in other parties reminded me of the Will Rogers phenomenon, which is related to Simpson’s paradox.
Currently
I believe there are still a few tickets available for Rob Eastaway’s talk on the maths of Shakespearean London at MathsWorld UK in Southwark tomorrow (Thursday, January 29th, 6:50pm).
I’m still catching up with the latest Finite Group livestream on Scroggsvent (young Bill, quite reasonably, asks how Santa managed to deliver all of the presents if we weren’t able to fix his sleigh until Christmas Day?).
You’re running out of time to submit items for the upcoming Carnival of Mathematics, hosted by Laura at Letters and Words.
That’s all I’ve got for this week. If you have friends and/or colleagues who would enjoy Double Maths First Thing, do send them the link to sign up – they’ll be very welcome here.
If you’ve missed the previous issues of DMFT or – somehow – this one, you can find the archive courtesy of my dear friends at the Aperiodical.
Meanwhile, if there’s something I should know about, you can find me on Mathstodon as @icecolbeveridge, or at my personal website. You can also just reply to this email if there’s something you want to tell me.
Until next time,
C