In 2018 I ran a just-for-fun competition to find “The World’s Most Interesting Mathematician”. It was so much fun that I ran it again in 2019 and 2020. And then big things happened in my life and the wider world and I haven’t had the energy to do it again.
Until now!
This post is both a video and text. The content is largely the same in both versions, so you can pick one to look at.
I’d like to show you a puzzle, or game for one person, that Ed Kirkby came up with. Ed showed this to me at the Big MathsJam gathering last year.
I was walking around MathsJam and people were doing all sorts of stuff and Ed was quietly sat at a table with some cards in front of them, and a couple of people were gathered around with thoughtful faces, so I thought “oh that looks interesting” and I walked over and Ed explained the rules of this game to me.
And like most things at MathsJam, I didn’t immediately know the solution but it really got to me, so I went away and tried to find a solution myself. It was really fun and it was one of those pure experiences of mathematical discovery that you really remember.
I kept grabbing other people and saying, “have you seen Ed’s puzzle? Come over here. Ed, explain this puzzle to this person!” I did that for the duration of the weekend, and for a little while after I got back home.
I’ll show you what the puzzle is.
Take two sets of cards numbered 1 to 4, and lay them out in two rows. The game is to get them the other way round, so each row goes 4, 3, 2, 1.
The things you are allowed to do are to swap two cards that are adjacent numbers and in adjacent columns.
So you can swap the four and three here:
You can also swap to the other row.
You can’t swap the four and the two here because they’re not adjacent numbers.
It’s a permutations puzzle. And with a bit of thinking, a lot of just making random moves, eventually I worked out how to do it for four cards (or two lots of four cards, to be precise).
It took me a few more goes to be sure that I’d found the shortest solution — the fewest moves — but then five really stumped me.
When I tried six cards, I wasn’t sure it was possible at all: there was a point where I kept getting stuck.
So I was really unsure, and Ed was unsure as well – they didn’t know if there was a solution for every number of cards. They’d written some code that very slowly churned out solutions for small $n$, but didn’t have a general solution.
So I did my usual problem solving technique which was, if I couldn’t do it with four cards, do it with three cards, and very briefly with two cards. Then after a while I sort of started seeing a pattern.
I came away from Big MathsJam not knowing how to solve this puzzle.
I kept playing with it when I should have been working, and eventually I think I’ve sort of got the vibe of how it works and I’m pretty sure now I can solve it for any number of cards. I haven’t written down a really rigorous algorithm for doing it but I’ve got a general idea.
Something that often happened when I was playing with cards was that I’d forget which way I was going, because when you don’t have a strategy you’re sort of making lots of moves to see where they’ll go, and then maybe you want to backtrack a bit, and you go like wait wait — which end did the aces start at? You’re continually picking up cards and moving them, and if you’re as clumsy as I am they scatter all over the place and you end up unsure if you’re in a valid state.
So it won’t surprise you to learn that I made an online version of this.
Big MathsJam happens in November, and by the time I’d got this online version working it was getting close to Christmas and I thought, “we need something that’s not playing cards to be the pieces – why shouldn’t it be baubles? They’re circles, they’re easy to draw.”
So I spent some time drawing a bauble image and making it look Christmassy. I didn’t quite get it ready for last Christmas, so I spent some more time improving the interface and I made it fully keyboard accessible.
And then I made a note to write a post about it in December 2023. And here we are!
I think this is a nice Christmas puzzle: I think the set-up and the rules are easy to remember, and it only needs a pack of cards, which you’ll probably have lying around.
So over Christmas, if there’s a quiet moment, if you get some playing cards in your Christmas cracker or just some pieces that you can put in an easy to identify order, try showing this to someone.
So there you go, that’s the Double Back puzzle, invented by Ed Kirkby, online version made by me.
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of June 2023, is now online at Double Root.
The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.
Hexaflexagons are great.
If you haven’t seen one before, you’re about to have a lovely time.
If you have seen them before, the reason I’m writing about them is that I’ve made a webpage that helps you create a template for a hexaflexagon with your choice of picture on each of the three faces.
A couple of days ago, a question occurred to me:
What’s the furthest I’ve ever been from anyone else?
Actual aperiodicity news on The Aperiodical!
This is probably the biggest aperiodicity news we’ll ever cover here: David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss have produced a single shape which tiles the plane, and can’t be arranged to have translational symmetry.
And it’s so simple!
Here’s a round-up of news stories from January 2023.
The British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced that all students will study maths to age 18. The response has been varied, with commentators from both within mathematics and from non-mathematical backgrounds weighing in (with varying degrees of nuance).
However, this isn’t planned to happen soon – only to start the work to introduce this during this Parliament, with actual implementation to happen at an unspecified point in the future.
It’s worth noting that there is a shortage of maths teachers, with nearly half of schools currently using non-specialist maths teachers, according to the TES.
The fact this might make maths a political football is a bit of a problem – the opposition Labour party say “they’ve nothing to offer the country except double maths”. (As much as we love maths, we’ll agree there are more important things to worry about at the moment).
The Chrome browser, and eventually other browsers built on it such as Edge and Opera, can now render MathML without any additional libraries as of version 109. Chrome briefly had some support for MathML, which was removed in 2013 due to lack of interest from Google. The developers who were working on it have kept plugging away, funded by the open source software consultancy Igalia.
Until now, the only reliable way to display mathematical notation on the web has been to use a JavaScript library such as MathJax or KaTeX, which do all the work of laying out symbols using generic HTML elements.
Now, you can just put MathML code in a page and expect most browsers to display it, like this:
There’s still a need for MathJax and the like: writing MathML code is no fun, so they’re still useful for translating LaTeX code, and MathJax adds a range of annotations that help with accessibility. But this is a step towards mathematical notation being much easier to work with on the web!
The US National Academies have released a series of posters “Illustrating the impact of the mathematical sciences”.
CLP’s place of work still has some Millennium Maths Project posters clinging on to the walls, older than almost all of the students, so maybe it’s time for a refresh! (via Terence Tao)
Tim Austin is the new Regius professor mathematics at Warwick. (via Warwick Mathematics Institute)
A bit of bureaucracy news: the Council for the Mathematical Sciences, comprising the five learned societies for maths and stats in the UK, is creating a new Academy for the Mathematical Sciences. It looks like the societies for the different sub-disciplines have acknowledged they need to work together, though this gives off a “now you have n+1 standards” smell. They’ve got a nice logo, though.
The Financial Times style guide changed so that ‘data’ is always singular, pragmatically following common usage. FT writer Alan Beattie said it best: “For anyone opposed, I’d like to know what your agendum is.“
The London Mathematical Society will hold a ceremony in London on 22nd March to officially award the Christopher Zeeman medal to the 2020 and 2022 medallists, Matt Parker and Simon Singh.
The ICMS in Edinburhgh has launched a “Maths for Humanity” initiative, which will be “devoted to education, research, and scholarly exchange having direct relevance to the ways in which mathematics, broadly construed, can contribute to the betterment of humanity.” (via Terence Tao)
Yuri Marin has died. The Max Planck Institute has posted an obituary describing his life’s work. One of his PhD students, Arend Bayer, collected some memories in a Mastodon thread.
William ‘Bill’ Lawvere has died. There is a page on the nLab describing his life’s work.