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Double Maths First Thing: Issue 3A

By Colin Beveridge. Posted October 15, 2025

Double Maths First Thing almost forgot to put this line in!

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

This week I am mainly getting to grips with reluctantly becoming treasurer for my Toastmasters club. They’re letting me loose with the bank account? Good grief.

More creatively – oi, enough of that – I’m looking forward to a Pseudorandom Ensemble rehearsal this weekend, and spending some time finishing up the first draft of the fiction project that’s moving, slowly but inevitably, towards being completed.

Links

We’ll start this week with one of those “that doesn’t seem like an interesting topic for an article” articles that turns out, in point of fact, to be an interesting topic for an article after all. Here’s Robert Aboukhalil on the Burrows-Wheeler transform for helping lossless data compression.

In “this looks like a cool thing to play with” news, Victor Poughon has made a calculator that works on intervals rather than numbers.

Hot off the Aperiodical press, Katie Steckles has a set of books to recommend to maths students. I concur with the Vicky Neale recommendation especially; I reviewed it a few years ago.

In the Grauniad at the weekend, a nice piece about computing pioneer Tommy Flowers – although the idea that mathematicians are “too weird and abstracted to trust”.

Robin Houston pointed me at the Flummoxagon, a jigsaw puzzle with some good maths behind it. (The wider site is full of interesting art/puzzles/DMFT-friendly stuff.)

Currently

Tuesday coming, October 21st, is the traditional evening for MathsJam around the world and online. Your local custom may differ; check here for details, or instructions on how to start your own.

Tom Briggs and Jason Yip are trying a Thing: you can get involved with the History and Maths in Education Network here.

Keep getting involved in Mathober – today’s word is ‘chord’, which is clearly an excuse to write a mathematical song. (My favourite chord at the moment is G#dim. It’s like an E7, but without the E.)

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 39

By Colin Beveridge. Posted October 8, 2025

DMFT is grateful for the last minute.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of doing maths and solving problems.

Today I went to a school in Poole to talk about my career in maths and computing as part of Dorset Coding Week. They asked me great questions and then I helped them with a Scratch project. One of the kids did a double fistpump when they got their code to work and I was thrilled – that’s the sort of joy and delight I want to be spreading.

(Also, apparently I’m now available again for going into schools to talk and do workshops. Rates reasonable.)

Links

Let’s start with another joyful coding experience: Sarah Spencer used a Raspberry Pi and a 1980s knitting machine to knit a map of the sky. Amazing stuff.

OK, fine, we’re all in on stuff that makes me grin this week. Here are depictions of various algorithms in the style of IKEA instructions. As Saga Norén (Länskrim Malmö) would say, “bra.”

Some origami, too: how to make a lovely square, Bauhaus-style.

Colin Wright has reminded me of a fabulous pattern in the powers of 2, 5 and 10, and invites “intuitive” explanations.

And lastly: feast your brains on the ambigram hall of fame. Some of these are incredible.

Currently

Carnival of Mathematics 243 is live at Ioanna Georgiou’s blog; next month’s is hosted by Robin at Theorem of the Day, one of the Carnival’s most stalwart contributors.

Mathober is still going strong – my favourite contribution so far is Oscar’s polyhedral alignment chart.

If you’re interested in shaping the future of Bletchley Park (and encouraging them to make more of the maths they have), they’re recruiting a focus group.

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 38

By Colin Beveridge. Posted October 1, 2025

DMFT wants to be in the room where it happens

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and happiness in doing maths, solving puzzles and generally figuring stuff out.

We went to see Hamilton (the musical, not Academical) in the cinema at the weekend – I saw it in the theatre 18 months ago, but it was new to the kids. Disappointingly short on quaternions, though.

Links

If we’re talking about the American Revolution, while wanting to take a dig at the UK government of the early 2010s, a good place to start is an analysis of metadata, or using eigenvectors to find Paul Revere by Kieran Healy. It’s also interesting to see what the revolution did for maths.

Paul Revere isn’t a character in Hamilton, but Thomas Jefferson is. There’s an election method named after him, which is formally the same as the D’Hondt method; I have no information on whether D’Hondt was less problematic than Jefferson.

There’s some interesting game theory in the revolution: why didn’t the sides compromise?

1776 was a key year for maths: the birth year of Sophie Germain*. It’s pretty shameful that she’s not one of the scientists named on the Eiffel Tower. (Some years ago, young Bill came home from nursery excited that he’d made a new friend called Sophia, “like a 3D circle”.)

Spoiler alert (in fairness, it’s revealed in the first song), Hamilton dies in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. The Ten Duel Commandments has both duellists firing at once, but tradition dictates taking turns. How big an advantage is that? TL;DR: I am not throwing away My Shot. Speaking of duels, in Tony Rothman’s debunking of some Galois myths, he mentions that one of the character witnesses at one of young Évariste’s trials was America’s favourite fighting Frenchman, General Lafayette. I thought that was a nice link.

Currently

There must be a Carnival along in the next few days! You’ll be able to find it at Ioanna’s blog. I’m not sure What Comes Next, but you’ll be able to submit links via the Aperiodical as usual.

Today is the first day of Mathober – do share your prompt-inspired works of creativity on sigh the socials with the appropriate hashtag.

The last TMiP animation challenge of 2025 wrapped up a couple of weeks ago – the playlist of responses is available.

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 – What Did I Miss? – 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, when You’ll Be Back,

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 37

By Colin Beveridge. Posted September 24, 2025

Double Maths First Thing didn’t know the letters went that big.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to share the joy and delight I take in figuring stuff out and solving puzzles. This weekend just gone, I went to the not-yet-open MathsWorld venue in Southwark to hang out with my geeks and practise calculating pi by hand. Young Bill was thrilled that Matt Parker signed his calculator, and I’ve spent the last couple of days reading up on ways that might improve the method. Turns out Leonhard Euler was pretty clever, who knew?

I also got to meet the co-author of the maths/art crossover short stories I’ve been working on for ages – we’re getting closer and closer to a first draft, and I’m really excited about it.

Links

Microsoft Excel turns 40 on September 30th, or (as it insists) 3.33333333. Ever wanted to turn your photos into a spreadsheet? This has Andrew Taylor’s fingerprints all over it.

Waiting for the optician the other day, Bill asked to play Wordle as if we were still in 2021. I think Mastermind is a better game, and Erik Göransson Gaspar has a lovely article about optimal play.

Another good strategy game: Paper soccer, which I recall stealing a great deal of time from me back in the day.

On one hand, I loathe headlines that start with the word “This”, a symptom of the Buzzfeedification of everything, but I’ll make an exception here: a chap in New York state has built a scale model of NYC. Maths? Sometimes it’s ok just to share something cool.

Another cool thing: an investigation into the physics of badminton. It’s not a sport I play, and if it was, I don’t think the sport I would play would be the same sport as people who use a spin serve play

And let’s end with some research on the effectiveness of graphs in climate science, where a study finds that binaries (yes/no) are more effective at convincing the public than continuous graphs.

Currently

There’s a Finite Group livestream with scicomm legend Hana Ayoob on the maths of colour tomorrow, September 25th at 12 noon UK time. (I’ll be watching it on catch-up, which is one of the many perks of being a member of the Group.)

Early bird tickets for Big MathsJam are only available until the end of September – if you’re going to hang out with us and do maths (with cakes, music, craft, games, etc. all available) in Milton Keynes in November, now would be an excellent time to buy your tickets. Next week, they’ll be about 11% more expensive.

I’ve never been to MathsConf, but the next one is on October 11th-12th: several friends of mine are speaking or running workshops, including Tom Briggs, Rob Eastaway and Karen Hancock.

Lastly, the annual tradition that is Mathober is almost upon us; Fractal Kitty has, as always, come up with a set of daily prompts for all of us to use as inspiration for… whatever we like, really. At least one PRE song has been written as a result.

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 36

By Colin Beveridge. Posted September 17, 2025

There is a good service on all DMFT lines

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to share the joy, love and creativity of doing exactly the right maths for you.

This week, I have mainly been cursing the name of Scroggs and his cursed Chalkdust crossnumber. (It’s traditional, when someone mentions Chalkdust magazine, for you to say “what’s that?” and the response to be “it’s a magazine for the mathematically curious”.)

Links

If you’re anything like me, you will find the following pair of links to be personal catnip: three-dimensional maps of stations in Europe and the Americas, as well as specifically on the London Underground. I’ve certainly been more lost in Elephant & Castle than the map makes it look possible to be.

I’m shocked – shocked – to discover that there is fraud going on in scientific publishing and some academics are gaming the system, a fine example of Cunningham’s law. (Tee hee). The paper outlines some approaches to limit this, and reminds me of some reasons I don’t play academia any more.

The kids, when they do what I always called ‘carries’ and ‘borrows’ in arithmetic, use the word ‘exchanges’, which is a much more reasonable word. I also liked this explanation of ‘fat numbers’, which make the exchanges explicit.

In ‘slightly evil’ news from 2011 (the site is currently down, hence the Web Archive link), Simon Inns built a Vetinari Clock that ticks irregularly. As well as leaving visitors feeling ill at ease, clocks can be used to explain the basics of cryptography.

And lastly, certainly winning the prize for “most provocative title”, a 2000 paper by Adler and Tanton demonstrates that π is the minimum value for pi.

Currently

Yesterday was the antepenultimate Tuesday of the month, which means Little MathsJam is almost upon us. In most of the world, that’ll be on Tuesday September 23rd, but check the website for your local details.

Also coming up is the rescheduled Finite Group livestream for September, featuring scicomm legend Hana Ayoob. That’s on Thursday September 25th for paying subscribers; free tier members do get access to an often entertaining Discord.

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 35

By Colin Beveridge. Posted September 10, 2025

DMFT turns around, and every now and then it falls apart

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in mathematics. I’m tutoring a bit of Further Core Pure 1 this year, and it was quite instructive to do a paper and find that I’m not immune to careless arithmetic errors or missing entire sections of a question. Oops. (It’s also reminded me that there are things I understand only at a shallow level and that means I get to do some exciting thinking soon.)

Two admin notes: firstly, my apologies to Helena Verrill, whose name I misspelt in last week’s email. I’ve corrected it on the Aperiodical version, but obviously I can’t fix an email after it goes out. Sorry, Helena!

Secondly, I mentioned a dice problem a few issues back, but forgot to mention that it’s a variant of the Ross-Littlewood paradox.

Links

We had a lunar eclipse at the weekend! Only I messed up my timings and missed totality. I did produce representations of my (very likely flawed) mental models of lunar phases and lunar eclipses.

A few months ago, I referred to a monostable tetrahedron that had been discovered both in theory, and on Colin Wright’s desk. Matt Parker has a video about it.

Speaking of the moon and of Colin, he recently shared a video of our dearly-missed mutual friend Adam Atkinson, telling the heavy boots story. I’ve certainly shared that before, but it’s always a delightful memory.

There are many pressing problems in the world. One of the most pressing is, of course, how to cut an onion into the most regular pieces possible.

Not strictly maths-related, but I was inspired by the story of Frances Oldham Kelsey on Cautionary Tales, standing up for science when it would have been politically much easier to fold.

I think we can all agree that anyone who tries to map the Earth on a 2D surface is fighting a losing battle – but at the same time, some efforts are more valiant than others. This project aims to get the areas right, at least.

As a key (and occasionally off-key) member of the Pseudorandom Ensemble, I’m a fan of pseudorandom things – such as, for instance, a method of producing pseudorandom numbers in one’s head. (Meanwhile, Kit Yates is rocking some of our merch.)

Currently

If you’re in charge of children and want to do some maths with them – and what else would you do? – Alison Kiddle and Katie Steckles’s 15 Minute Maths Shop is open for business.

The final TMiP animation challenge of the year is drawing to a close – if you want to animate something related to space-filling curves, you can share your work there.

Margaret Low, who ran a reportedly excellent workshop at TMiP, is running a free online introduction to Turtlestitch next Wednesday, September 17th. Details here.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has a call for mathematical art for a common room. Deadline for proposals is December 1st.

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 34

By Colin Beveridge. Posted September 3, 2025

DMFT rocked.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician, on a renewed mission to spread the joy and delight in maths after a tremendous few days at the Talking Maths in Public conference. I listed some highlights here, and decided that rather than try to fit into job-shaped holes, I shall continue in my goal to emulate Terry Tao by being a friendly firehose of maths. (Still, hire me for cool maths projects!)

What happens at TMiP… needs to be shouted around the world, honestly, especially if you’re thinking of the Pseudorandom Ensemble show. We rocked. People were coming up to me all week and reminding me that the Pope’s got notes on polytopes. You can probably hire us to do a show if you’ve got a crowd who’d like us.

The other thing to mention is that tomorrow is DMFT’s birthday. Issue 0 went live on September 4th last year. Looking back, it took a while to settle down into its current format, didn’t it? I hope you’re still enjoying it. Do spread the word!

Links

A fascinating link via Martin Whitworth, the story of Thomas Fowler (pdf), a contemporary of Babbage who actually built a working computer some time around 1840. About 150 years later, people built another wooden computer to play noughts and crosses (pdf), via Robin Houston.

Puzzle games, you say? At one point, I hoped to do my fourth year undergraduate project on Minesweeper. Oscar Cunningham has done the sort of analysis I’d have liked to, with additional discussion on mathstodon involving Simon Tatham, who knows a thing or two about it.

If you’ve designed games, you’ve probably thought about grids. Here’s something on triangular ones, and a tutorial on hexagonal ones.

Patterns? Helena Verrill, who was at TMiP, has a lovely page of interactive animations.

Perhaps, like my dear friend Marla, you’ve tried to play the theremin, but unlike Marla, found it difficult to play. Well, it’s your lucky day: Linus Akesson has invented a theremin with a keyboard, a qweremin.

Currently

Lots of currently, currently. Let’s start with the news that Project Picross ended successfully: the human race collectively solved all (just short of) 25,000,000 five-by-five solvable nonograms.

There was to be a Finite Group livestream with the incredible Hana Ayoob this week, but owing to a scheduling clash, it’s been rearranged for September 25th. It’s worth joining the group in the meantime, if only to hang out with cool maths people.

Tickets are available for Big MathsJam which is in Milton Keynes this year – a new venue, that’s hopefully a bit more accessible. Early-bird prices end on September 30th.

My good friend Tom “Thomas K Briggs” Briggs has a book out now. I’ve read it and reviewed it here. I liked it. Another good friend, Rob Eastaway, has recently rearranged his blog under keywords. I enjoyed this post about failed conversions.

Lastly, it’s the start of a new month, which means it’s time for a Carnival of Mathematics – and I’ve collated this one. Next month’s host is Ioanna Georgiou, and you can submit items for it 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.

Until next time,

* Edited to correct the spelling of Helena Verrill’s name. Apologies — and thanks to Colin Wright for catching it.