Double Maths First Thing no longer runs marathons.
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of doing maths, figuring things out and generally taking pleasure in doing clever things.
Like everyone else, I was thrilled to see Sabastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha break the two-hour barrier in the London Marathon this weekend. I was thrilled enough to break the five-hour barrier a decade ago in Manchester, and have dreams of a two-hour half-marathon at some distant future point. I wouldn’t normally link to an ad, but here are some regular people trying to run at two-hour-marathon pace – for comparison, the course record at Weymouth Parkrun is 14:47. Sawe’s effort is roughly equivalent to beating that by 40 seconds, then running seven and a half more parkruns at the same pace. Meanwhile, the maths community’s own Mats Vermeeren ran a very creditable 3:06 (a parkrun-equivalent of 22 minutes) and Hari from Maths City Leeds ran the distance in aid of the Samaritans, and I’m sure he and they would be grateful for support. Well done to Mats and Hari and anyone else who took part.
Links
Following up from last week’s geometric poetry, Mark Jones Jr prodded me to mention Piet Hein, mathematician, designer and poet best known for his “grooks”, including:
Problems worthy of attack
Prove their worth by fighting back.
Elsewhere in Europe, Ionica Smeets reminded me of the Leiden wall formulas, the sort of mathematical art project I’d love to see more of. Also in lovely things, here’s a picture from Peter Tait’s 1885 paper “On Knots Part III”, showing all of the 10-crossing knots.
I’ve got far too much on my plate to investigate this paper by Anton Petrunin, which has close to 200 geometric problems with elegant solutions. Feel free to read it and tell me if it’s any good.
Personally, I’m not in the set of people who loves Venn diagrams – but I am in the set of people who enjoys incredibly complicated but also gorgeous graphical representations, so I’m slightly torn. Here are more, and if that’s not enough, Peter Hamburger’s archive is here. (Thanks to @pozorvlak).
Karen Campe notes that some of the US administration could use a refresher on how percentages work. I refrain from political commentary in DMFT (at least today), but you can probably infer my position towards the US administration without too much guesswork.
Currently
Kit Yates has a new book out, You Don’t Know What You’re Missing. I’m hopeful that my review of Richard Elwes’s Huge Numbers will also be live by the time this is published.
If you’d like your 2D mathematical artwork to be featured at the ICM in Philadelphia, you can let IMAGINARY know about it here. Deadline is tomorrow, April 30.
Annoyingly, I didn’t hear about Samira Mian’s InHERited LINES exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall until after last week’s edition – but if you’re at the RAH for a show, you can still see her amazing Islamic patterns in the Amphi Corridor until May 12th. If you’ve got events you think I’d like to point people at, please let me know about them!
EAKING NEWS … BREAKING NEWS … I understand Ayliean was on Radio Scotland this morning, talking about the World Cup sticker book … BR
[Edited 2026-04-29]: Part of Ayliean’s prepared piece aired around 7:50am on the Breakfast show, so around one hour fifty into the audio — but “they cut out all the maths”. Bah.
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