Double Maths First Thing is NOT procrastinating in the group chat. Why would you even suggest that?

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of doing maths and, from time to time, the absurdities it throws up.

For example, if you’re a certain way inclined, you could get hold of a grant to cover a beach in aperiodic monotiles, like Christian Lawson-Perfect and team did last weekend. It sounds like it was a fabulous couple of days, and I’m looking forward to seeing and sharing a full write-up.

Links

I’ve frequently tried and failed to make use of flashcard systems like Mnemosyne to remember stuff. I say failed, I was red-hot at capitals of the world for a while during COVID, but the chances of coming out with “Honiara” on Pointless weren’t high enough to make it worth keeping up. Michael Nielsen uses something similar to understand some maths.

Hamish Todd thinks probabilities are a bit rubbish and that we should use surprisal instead.

Over on reddit, someone incorrectly finds hexagonal Truchet tiles to be mildly infuriating. I wrote about them some years ago in Chalkdust, and Stephen Muirhead told me what I was missing. MUCH more infuriating is when someone is wrong in the supermarket (in this case, Tesco.)

The fast inverse square root hack from Quake is not (it turns out) original to Quake: Fabien Giessen has a thread about it here. Relatedly, Robin Houston has a fascinating thread about magic numbers that linked to this classic from Rachel By The Bay.

Friend of DMFT Tom Briggs wants to know about maths in literature. Tell him!

Currently

If you’re not in the Finite Group, then (1) you should fix that and (2) you’ll have missed Ayliean’s report from Beach Spectres, which includes spectacular drone footage.

Sophia at Fractal Kitty has collated Carnival of Mathematics 252, and you can submit links to Robin Whitty’s Carnival 253 at the usual link.

Those of you looking for maths communication training probably ought to spend £15 to book in to Katie Steckles and Ben Sparks’ LMS workshop, which is running in London tomorrow (Thursday June 11th) and online next week (Thursday June 18th). Absolute steal.

Psst, don’t tell anyone, but there are rumours of a Pseudorandom Ensemble show in London in September. I don’t think it’s officially announced yet.

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

* Edited 2026-06-10 to fix minor typos.