Double Maths First Thing doesn’t fear the REAPER
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy and surprise. This week is full of leavers’ assemblies and general end-of-term commitments, so you’ll forgive me for keeping it brief.
Links
Let’s start at EMF, which (for various good reasons) is not my cup of tea, but might well be yours – especially if you revel in things like Ayliean spending five hours doing 14 levels of a Tower of Hanoi. It always surprises me that it’s not a very old puzzle, it was invented by Lucas and written up in Récréations mathématiques. (Incidentally, if anyone wants to fund a translation of Rec Math into English, let me know! That’s my sort of project.) Dear friend Alison Kiddle spoke about the maths of knitting. Robin Houston and pals made a Large Object.
Speaking of Robin, he pointed me at an AI-generated counterexample to an open conjecture. There seems to be some dispute about how surprising or important it is, and I’ve no desire to get dragged into that, thank you.
Today is Pi Approximation Day, where 22/7 is a better approximation to pi than 3.14 is, and has the advantage of being the way someone might write the date. (I’d expect Americans to write 3/14 rather than 3.14.) In any event we know a song about that. You might want to work with different approximations.
In games that look far more complicated than I have the headspace to engage with, it’s Go but with Voronoi cells. Let me know if you have fun with it!
Lastly, an excellent rant from Cat Hicks that articulates one of my big problems with exams.
Currently
There’s a Finite Group livestream at noon UK time tomorrow (July 23rd). I think it’s symmetry-related.
At MathsWorld, upcoming lates include Henry Segerman on July 28th and June Barrow-Green on August 12th, both from 6:50pm UK time. I understand they might have engaged one of the UK’s top ten mathematically-inspired musical combos for the September edition.
We’re coming up to the deadline for the summer Carnival of Mathematics – submit your links for Robin Whitty here.
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