Double Maths First Thing insists it’s March 32nd
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight in mathematical thinking. After the clock change and a trip to that London – we chanced on a Rob Eastaway talk at Maths World that a weekly maths newsletter ought to have known about – I’m tired and out of sorts so this might be a less-detailed-than-usual issue.
Links
For the day that’s in it, let’s start by revisiting the Aperiodical maths pun of the year (2014) competition. They really ought to resurrect that! The Mathematical Objects podcast has a couple of joke-based episodes – one with Bec Hill and one about a sheep, at least half of which is black.
A candidate for the greatest league table ever calculated: the English Championship, but sorted by the name of the closest Wetherspoons to the ground, translated into the native language of the club’s most recent non-English manager. This still makes more sense to me than the classification in the Tour de France (I feel like there’s something involving the peloton missed out of that explanation.)
While I might be out of sorts, Simon Willison certainly isn’t: he’s got several of them animated for your understanding pleasure. Also in good explanations, Julia Evans has a nice comic about public-key encryption that’s about the idea rather than the details.
Gerard Westendorp has been exploring the space of triangles, after being inspired by a post on Heron triangles and elliptic curves.
On the train home, I had to bite my tongue a bit at a lovely pair of teachers – one drama, one music – over the table who were trying very hard not to say “I was never any good at maths”. I should have shown them this article (and mentioned Rob’s talk about maths and Shakespeare.
Currently
I understand Alison Kiddle smashed their Maths World Lates talk last night – next month, it’ll be Ayliean‘s turn, running a geometry draw-along. Details here; it’s Wednesday April 22nd at 6:15pm UK time.
There’ll be a new carnival post any day at Tom Rocks Maths; Karrie Liu is hosting Carnival 251, and you can submit items at the usual link.
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