Double Maths First Thing still has PRE earworms
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight that comes from engaging whole-heartedly with maths.
I’ve been in Peterborough this weekend playing with the Pseudorandom Ensemble, putting together some songs we hope to record. (We’re available to play shows, festivals, parties, etc. – just hit reply if you want more details.)
Links
Let’s have some maths games news, starting with DMFT’s coding hero Christian Lawson-Perfect and his Number Builder game. A game I wish existed (and that may do, at least in prototype): Conway’s Game of Death.
Speaking of Christian, it looks like the Beach Spectres project will be going ahead this summer – June 6th and 7th in Whitley Bay. That’s the other end of the country to me, but maybe I can cover Weymouth beach with spectres at the same time.
Here’s Hope Duncan explaining what makes Numberphile good.
I wouldn’t have thought of it as something that allows a World Championship, but it turns out that Microsoft Excel has a World Champion. Meanwhile, 9-year-old Teodor Zajder has knocked nearly 10% off of the speedcubing world record. That’s not quite the same as running the 100m in well under nine seconds, but it’s that magnitude of improvement.
You know how sometimes you get an Itch? The sudden need to know something that you didn’t even realise was a question until a few moments before? Tom Buckley-Houson and Ryan Bergers have calculated the longest line-of-sight from everywhere on earth. I, for one, appreciate their dedication.
Currently
It’s MathsJam day around the world next week – find your nearest meeting (or start your own) here.
There is no February meeting of the Chalkdust book club, but that simply gives you more time to acquire and read the March book, which is Tom Briggs’s The Mathematician’s Library. That meeting will take place on March 31st.
Next Wednesday (February 18th), there’s a Finite Group livestream at 4pm UK time. I’ll see you there!
Dr Katherine Holmes is running an online Introduction to Improv for Confident Science Communication course with deeply discounted tickets, running on Thursday evenings in March. Kate is great. You should sign up.
The Oxford Women And Non-Binary People In Maths Day is a free conference on February 28th, open to all; registrations are open now. If you go, be sure to tell them to book the Pseudorandom Ensemble for next year.
An opportunity to do some creative outreach: if you’re a mathematician, you can sign up to give short online talks to schoolchildren as part of I’m A Mathematician.
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