Double Maths First Thing has an open mic spreadsheet
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy and delight in figuring stuff out. I did some lovely science last week, full on hypothesis-experiment-eureka! and an immediate improvement in my client’s model. It was either that or try to explain the current British political situation to a friend in Berlin and I have NO need for a response with that level of concerned and slightly baffled pity.
One correction from last week’s issue: OEIS will be naming its 400,000th sequence, not its 40,000th. What’s an order of magnitude between friends?
Links
I could probably spend an entire week looking at Calculating History – that page is about computing with linkages, but there are any number of ingenious calculating machines there. Speaking of ingenuity, somewhere in the mathemattic, I have a Sugihara ambiguous cylinder, which looks like squares from the front and circles from the back (or vice versa). Dave Richeson has a paper at Bridges about alternative ways to construct them and a (much older) video here.
Other oddly satisfying shapes via /r/oddlysatisfying – and Dorset legend Barney Maunder-Taylor doing something similar with more panache (and possibly earlier.
Interested in making mathematics materials more accessible? You want to watch Christian Lawson-Perfect talking about it here. Speaking of CLP, he’s got an excellent nerdsnipe question here.
DMFT favourite David K Butler has been making two-sided ruler constructions.
Wildly off-topic but extremely fun: Some years back, ScotRail released their sound clips for station announcements. You can make your own here.
Currently
Tuesday (July 21st) is the traditional MathsJam evening around the globe, although your local one may vary; it’s easy to start your own if there isn’t one near you.
Robin Houston reports that the Escher exhibition in London has a nice gimmick.
Do submit your Carnival of Maths suggestions for Robin Whitty.
There’s a Finite Group livestream next week (Thursday July 23rd at noon BST).
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