Colin Beveridge

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Double Maths First Thing: Issue 1D

By Colin Beveridge. Posted March 26, 2025

Double Maths First Thing just doesn’t know any more

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread delight and joy in doing maths for the sake of it.

This week I have mainly been figuring out the mechanics of the Bokeh library so I can make it draw graphs. It’s really neat! (Now drawing graphs is a service I offer at a reasonable consulting rate.)

I’ve also been making progress with blindfold cubing — I managed a successful solve on the bluetooth cube in under 5:30, which is slower than I’d like; however, there’s plenty of time until the competition to get quicker and more reliable. (Talking of cubing, there’s a wealth of data available here.)

Links

Frank Lantz loves SET in a different way to how I do. If you don’t own it, you can get it from MathsGear for a tenner or so (UK).

Here’s an interesting (but ultimately, unsatisfying) article from Quanta via Wired about a new kind of hash table. I think my problem with this kind of article is that I want to know a bit more about the detail and a bit less about how it made people go wow.

Much more in-depth: this one’s about different sorts of means.

Finally, a curiosity: a number’s Zeckendorf decomposition is the unique way it can be written as non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers, so (e.g.) 20 = 13 + 5 + 2. You can use the Zeckendorf decomposition to factorise numbers, although it turns out to be pretty slow.

A geeky aside

I found out this week that Paul Erdős appeared as himself in the documentary N is a Number, as did Tomas Luczak.

Luczak had a minor role in The Mill and the Cross, which also featured Charlotte Rampling.

Rampling and Martin Sheen both had acting credits for Jerusalemki sindrom.

And Martin Sheen was in JFK with Kevin Bacon.

Therefore Paul Erdős has a Bacon number of four — and also an Erdős-Bacon number of four. (Nicholas Metropolis, according to the Wiki, is also a 4.)

My Erdős number is 5+i; the i was bestowed upon me at G4G after I wore Erdős’s coat.

As it happens, today is Erdős’s 112th birthday. Here’s Katie celebrating it a few years ago.

Currently

There is a partial solar eclipse on Saturday coming (March 29th), visible across most of Europe and around the North Atlantic. Don’t look directly at the sun, unless of course you’re the President, in which case feel free to ignore that woke nanny-state nonsense.

Registration is open for the Zeeman Award ceremony on May 7th in London — you don’t get a Zeeman Award without being a legend; this year’s laureate is Brady Haran of Numberphile. (The dates are all over the place on that page, but I’m assured it’s this May.)

And I deliberately missed off Chris Smith’s maths newsletter from “here are good places to get maths content” last week — but only because I needed to check with him about how to sign up. You email aap03102@gmail.com and he’ll be delighted to have you on board.

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,

Double Maths First Thing, Issue 1C

By Colin Beveridge. Posted March 19, 2025

Double Maths First Thing cannot currently take your call. Please leave a message after the beep. Beep.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy and delight. This week, I am mainly swearing at Scroggs and his fiendish crossnumber in the current issue of Chalkdust Magazine. He’s also written an article about how to set the cursed things, but it offers no clues (at least to me) about solving them.

But fine, I shall tear myself from tearing out what little hair I have remaining to share with you this week’s links.

Links!

Let’s start with the best title of the week: The Mathematics of Burger Flipping. I am a big fan of papers that take a reasonable question to unreasonable extremes.

Another reasonable question is, “how does GPS work?”. Ankur Mohan has a deeper dive than you could plausibly need.

A less reasonable question is, “can I link all 72 scientists named on the Eiffel Tower to pi?”. However unreasonable, since it was Pi Day, Katie Steckles had a creditable attempt, no matter how tenuous some of the suggestions are. Can you find a connection between Jacques Sturm and circles? Let her know if so.

(Incidentally — if you have reasonable questions that need a freelance mathematician to answer or explain, you can hire me at a rate which is also — you’ve guessed it — perfectly reasonable.)

I mentioned Perlin noise all the way back in issue 2; James Wilkins has a tutorial on how to use it to generate anything from landscapes to dungeons. This is on my still-to-read list, but looks awesome.

And let’s finish with a lovely bit of dataviz from Information is Beautiful, answering another reasonable question: how true are “based on a true story” films?

Currently!

I didn’t mention in last week’s issue that I had a poem in the MathsJam Shout. I don’t remember writing it, but it’s the sort of thing I would do. It was a Pi-ku (a poem of three lines, the first having three syllables, the second one and the third four — 3-1-4, sort of like pi.) It read:

Rational?
Pi?
Mumbo-jumbo!

I don’t have any upcoming events on my radar (if there’s something you’d like me to mention, do let me know). As always, you should be hanging out in the Finite Group Discord, keeping an eye on Talking Maths In Public, and telling anyone who will listen about the maths you find interesting. Go to!

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.

Until next time,

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 1B

By Colin Beveridge. Posted March 12, 2025

Double Maths First Thing thinks ISO8601’s great

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy — I almost misspelt “mathematical” as “mayhem”, so let’s have a bit of that, too.

I spent much of the weekend with a secret cabal of mathematical musicians at an undisclosed location. I’m not authorised to say whether we were rehearsing original maths songs and I certainly couldn’t comment on rumours of a future gig on the roof of the RI. By which I mean, you’ll likely hear more details in the future.

Links

What’s been on my radar this week? Well, r/math has been surprisingly interesting, with a dissection of a square into 32 similar triangles and a nice pandigital approximation for e.

It was pointed out to me that I didn’t say what I was trying to solve blindfold last week. To clarify, I’ve been learning the M2 method for solving the Rubik’s Cube. If you were a computer, you might prefer a more brute force method.

When I was about 8, I got into trouble at school for saying “DAMN!” when my Polydron dodecahedron collapsed. If you want to have the same experience of frustration, you can get a 10% discount over the next few months. (That’s not an affiliate link, we don’t roll that way around here.)

A way we do roll is to stand up and say “oi! no!” to bullies. I’m conscious that I have pretty close to a full bingo card of privilege, and that a lot of the toxic behaviour in academia flies beyond my radar. Dr Rachel Los’s Anti-Acknowledgements (p113), (or more conveniently, in a toot) in her thesis (brilliantly titled “Play Nice or Pay the Price”) make me sigh in despair; men need to stop behaving like this, and the “not all men” men need to call out this sort of behaviour.

Currently

Less upsettingly, there’s a lot going on at the moment! This week has Pi Day, about which I am largely curmudgeonly, but some people erroneously believe it’s more Geek Christmas than Big MathsJam is. Whatever, you do you!

Tuesday coming (March 18th, 2025) is the traditional time for your local MathsJam — find your nearest one here, along with instructions on how to start your own if the nearest one is inconvenient. There’s also an online (UK) one if that’s better for you.

And on Monday coming (March 17th), there’s a Finite Group livestream. The FG Discord is a great hangout for mathematicians, and I always enjoy watching the livestreams with my 11yo.

Last week, I neglected to mention that TMiP is organising an Animation Generation Collaboration — a challenge to see what people come up with, and to share techniques.

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.

Until next time,

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 1A

By Colin Beveridge. Posted March 5, 2025

DMFT is six months old! It’ll probably be walking soon.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in doing maths, for any reason or for none.

I have taken on a slightly silly, but at the same time DEADLY SERIOUS challenge to become good enough at blindfolded solving to take part in a competition in May in Weston-super-Mare (twinned, according to Moose Allain, with Champion the Wonder Horse). If you want to follow my progress, follow this link to Mathstodon.

I also ran the past month’s Carnival of Mathematics — they’re always on the lookout for new hosts, so do follow the instructions if you have some sort of maths blog and would be willing to host.

Links

A very easy first link this week, especially for a folk-topologist: when rivers end up in different watersheds. (A folk-topologist just needs three dimensions and a proof.)

Filed under “things I never knew existed and NOW I NEED TO HAVE”: a pop-up Elements of Euclid. If it goes missing from the Smithsonian, I trust you’ll be able to provide me with an alibi.

You know what else is cool? Quaternions are cool. Jason Fantl has a post explaining how to derive them, and I hope to have time to read it (rather than just look at the pictures) soon.

Possibly even cooler than quaternions is mathematical art, and Fractal Kitty is one of the top exponents (see what I did there?) of it. I enjoyed this post about colouring circles on a path.

Finally, exploring new concepts in paper structure, here is a choose-your-own-adventure exploration of parking functions.

Currently

I don’t BlueSky, but one doesn’t need to to see the #MathArtMarch challenge prompts and responses that Ayliean is currently organising. Join in! Catch up if you want to! Dip in and out if you prefer!

On Thursday March 6th (tomorrow, if you’re reading this the day it’s released), Dr Jamie Gallagher is giving a free online talk about science engagement at 2pm.

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.

Until next time,

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 19

By Colin Beveridge. Posted February 26, 2025

Double Maths First Thing got nerdsniped by the Parker Square

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight in doing maths for its own sake.

For example, I coded up a trammel in Geogebra after seeing this video. It’s fun to play with the parameters.

Links

James Pae has come up with an excellent answer to “when am I ever going to use that in real life?” by performing a detailed study of whether it’s true that the closer the shop to the Paris Métro, the worse the kebab.

Since we’re lining up the triumphs of mathematics: apparently statistics have completely ruined basketball. Maybe NBA fans will slowly migrate to rugby instead.

Whimsy? Goodness me, no, all super serious (if surprising) today; for instance, I’ve just come across a paper by Sarah Hart about the maths of Moby-Dick. (Aside: I once tried to use Moby-Dick as a base text for estimating the probabilities of letter sequences in 19th-century English. I discovered that the most common 4-grams in use at the time were WHAL and HALE before realising I was going to need a bigger corpus.)

I remember spending a long coach journey to Belgium transfixed by the puzzle of making any number from 1, 2, 3, 4 and whatever operations I could justify. A variant on this, using four 2s, was spoiled by Paul Dirac — Eli Bendersky has the story.

A very pretty thing from Gerard Westendorp: the Complex Farey fraction tessellation. I haven’t read through the maths yet, but it’s cool whether I understand it or not.

Currently

I’m given to believe that there is a US$10,000 bounty for anyone who discovers a true Parker square in the next couple of years. I’m also given to believe that if a magic square of squares exists, its elements are on the order of at least quintillions; I suspect there are none. Proof by MattJam: if one existed, his followers would have found it by now.

By the time the next DMFT comes out, I’ll have hosted the Carnival of Mathematics at Flying Colours Maths — if you’ve got any last-minute submissions, you’ll need to get them in quickly. And if you have any interesting facts about the number 237, those would be super-helpful.

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.

Until next time,

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 18

By Colin Beveridge. Posted February 19, 2025

Double Maths First Thing is not quite mathematically relegated yet

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the love and joy in maths.

My personal maths highlight of the week was well-actually-ing a Guardian Knowledge article, which claims that Man City were mathematically unable to stay on top of the 1972 Football League immediately after their final game. HOWEVER, had remaining results gone their way — specifically, a 17-17 draw between Liverpool and Derby County, and a 2-0 defeat for Liverpool in the other match — it was absolutely possible for the title to go to Maine Road (at least mathematically).

Links

On with the show!

Last week had my new favourite paper; this week has my new favourite talk title: Why Quantum Cryptanalysis is Bollocks. It’s a good read, hitting almost — almost — Adam Atkinson levels of scorn.

Two PDFs to begin with? A strong start. And this one is over a kilopage — given that it’s an Infinite Napkin, though, that shows some restraint. It’s an overview of an awful lot of pure maths, the sort of thing I skipped lectures about back in the day, but now find quite interesting.

I enjoyed this story of how to represent numbers in a calculator.

Given last night’s destruction of the kids’ Monopoly dreams (only one of them ended up in tears, I’m not completely heartless), it’s not as though I need help defeating the children at card games. In case you do, though, here is a card game and strategy. See if you can make more children cry! (It strikes me that you could also use it as a terrible way to approximate pi.)

In less mean news, Sam has a new game, in which you talk about maths with just short words. It sounds like great fun!

Currently

I understand DMFT was mentioned in a recent MathsGear newsletter. I’m a fan of the enterprise, and as far as I can tell, all of the dice I have ever bought from them are perfectly random.

I’m hosting the Carnival of Mathematics for early March — follow that link if you’ve got any maths links you’d like to share. Or email me, I’m always happy to hear of things!

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.

Until next time,

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 17

By Colin Beveridge. Posted February 12, 2025

Double Maths First Thing is checking its email far too often

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy and delight.

We had a family trip to the Science Museum in London at the weekend. I’ve written previously about the Winton Mathematics Gallery and I stand by it — young Bill was disappointed that there “wasn’t very much maths there”, which is about as damning an indictment as an 11-year-old can give. I get his point; the gallery is all about applying maths in other fields, and very little about doing maths as something worth doing for its own sake. I point you at Christian Lawson-Perfect’s Interesting Esoterica section on the act of doing maths as an antidote.

Links!

I have a new favourite paper, although I can’t reliably access it (it’s served over http and my browser says NO! HTTPS ONLY!). You may have better luck: it’s Tom Murphy VII’s extension of the Elo system to account for hilariously bad chess bots.

A couple of links about how computers store numbers: I enjoyed this curiosity about a fun piece of bit-hacking, and this even-less-practical article about an alternative way of encoding numbers with iterated logarithms. Practical, schmactical: part of the joy of maths is trying something unusual and seeing what shakes out.

Someone who took great delight in maths was Mary Everest Boole, as Lucy Rycroft-Smith explores here.

A nice article I’ve only skimmed looks at implementing a method for producing Voronoi diagrams. Despite spending a good deal of my PhD tearing my hair out over convex hulls and Delaunay triangulations, I still have a soft spot for Voronoi.

And since we’re being a bit silly, how about the search for London’s most central sheep?

Last one today: the Wikipedia article on the Taegukgi, the national flag of South Korea has a section suggesting how to construct it, just in case you wanted a Geogebra challenge.

Links

I spent a lot of Tuesday recovering from a vicious nerdsnipe, “courtesy” of
Matt Parker on Numberphile. I thought I had something based on Gaussian integers, but alas, I had blundered. Hardly surprising; smarter people than me have been hunting for a while, and if there was something simple they’d have found it by now. Again, though, the joy is in doing the maths.

Tuesday coming is MathsJam day — you should definitely join your local selection of geeks in the pub and/or organise a pub for your local selection of geeks to meet in, should there not be one already. I gather this month’s theme is pasta, although I suspect it’ll be disappointingly short of mathematical rigour-toni.

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.

Until next time,