Double Maths First Thing is guaranteed Christmas-free. Humbug!
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to find and spread mathematical joy.
This week’s interesting bit of analysis (and please don’t tell Dave Gale I did some statistics), gives a plausible answer to a question on Hacker News: if a statistic (employee performance) is normally distributed, why would a company’s distribution be Pareto? I’m quite pleased that a simple model led to a nice answer.
Laura Allport kindly pointed out to me that I’d missed a significant anniversary last week: it would have been Benoit B Mandelbrot’s 100th birthday. (Convention dictates that I have to tell you the B stands for Benoit B Mandelbrot.) Mandelbrot, somewhat indirectly, was a factor in my choosing to study at St Andrews rather than Cambridge — while waiting for a tour of the department, I read a wall display about his recent honorary degree and the faculty’s recent work on developing digital sundials. I thought that was very clever and cool. I still do.
Links
I’m an information theory dilettante, and always interested in things that move me away from ignorance, like this one that gives an alternative way to think about entropy.
Tim Richardt has a lovely deep dive into Pythagorean triples and the Stern-Brocot tree. MathsJam-esque, I’d say.
The usual suspects
Did I say this was Christmas-free? I’m sorry, that must have been my brother, who always lies. I did mention Humbug, though, one of Scroggs’s many alter egos. This time next week, we’ll be well into Scroggsvent, one of few things I love about December without any qualification at all. (In case you’re not familiar: 24 daily puzzles, each leading to a clue in a meta-puzzle; solve that and you’re in with the chance of a prize!)
I’ve plugged the Mathematical Objects podcast before, and will continue to do so, because it’s very good. I strongly recommend Ayliean’s parallelepiped episode, which peeks a little into her superhero origin story.
That’s all I’ve got this week! In the meantime, 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