Double Maths First Thing has Youri Tielemans in swaps

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of figuring stuff out.

I’ve been thinking a lot about MathsJam and Parkrun and similar activities, where the point is just showing up and doing the thing – very few people care who finishes their Parkrun first, and the volunteers actively encourage people to walk if they want to. If there’s any competition, it’s about improving your own abilities. MathsJam too, it’s not a competition, it’s about sharing a problem and the struggle with other people who like that sort of thing, maybe learning something new. There’s a certain sort of blowhard that likes to bang on about participation, but participation is how you get people to enjoy things, isn’t it?

Links

Email readers may have missed the exact timing of Ayliean’s stickerbook contribution to the BBC Radio Scotland Breakfast show, which aired at 6:26am (so if you scroll to 26 minutes in, you should hear it.) I’m told that Scroggs was behind some of the calculations.

I’m not a DnD player (yet! growth mindset, Colin, growth mindset), but Dimitri Lozeve is. Calamity befell his group when the DM forgot their dice – Dimitri saved the day with some quick emergency coding that apparently then got out of hand. His Rust code is available here.

Jonny Griffiths has spent several months revising his CAROM powerpoints – it stands for “Creative Activities Resulting in Offbeat Mathematics”, and the goal is to link A-level maths with university topics.

At Maps Mania, there’s a map of all of this century’s solar eclipses, the sort of thing that makes me sigh with pleasure. There are a lot of good posts at that site. Meanwhile, in “things I probably won’t ever get around to watching, but wish I would”, here’s Freya Holmér explaining why you can’t just multiply vectors.

Via Christian Lawson-Perfect’s Interesting Esoterica mathstodon bot, I’ve been reminded of squared squares – one of the people involved in figuring them out was Bill Tutte, one of the first computer-builders – by way of Solomon Golomb’s question: can you tile an infinite plane with squares? I mean, obviously yes, but there’s a catch: every square must have a positive integer side-length, and every positive integer must be used exactly once. That’s not quite so obviously yes, is it? You’d need a hot drink to figure it out – in which case, you’d definitely want some MathsGear coasters.

Currently

Speaking of CLP, if you are, or can arrange to be, anywhere near Whitley Bay on June 6th-7th, you can join him and Clare Wallace in covering the beach with spectre tiles. It’ll be spectracular.

Carnival of Mathematics 251 has arrived, courtesy of Karrie Liu! The next edition is hosted by the legendary Fractal Kitty Sophia, and you can submit relevant posts/videos/content here. (Incidentally, I’ve taken over from Ioanna — another superhero of the maths world — in the role of finding hosts for Carnivals. If you’d like to volunteer to pull together a month’s worth of posts at some unspecified future point, please let me know.)

I’m given to believe that Professor Hannah Fry will be one of the stars of this autumn’s Celebrity Traitors. I’ve been trying very hard not to watch it because I will get sucked in. They’ve added an unnecessary element of challenge, in my opinion.

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