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Double Maths First Thing: Issue 5B

By Colin Beveridge. Posted June 3, 2026

Double Maths First Thing doesn’t know where to start

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight that comes from working things through and wrapping them up with a neat mathematical bow.

Before anything else, a quick correction: last time out I credited Kate Holmes with the escape rooms rather than Kate Farrell. Apologies to both.

Over half term, I spent a few days in Kent, visiting Rochester Guildhall Museum and Hever Castle, most of which time I spent making “then I saw her face, now Anne Boleyn, Hever” jokes that don’t quite work. (Liked the water maze, though.) Slightly annoyingly, both places had some missed opportunities for maths exploration.





Links

Maths in museums, you say? Tom Briggs has a piece about that. I feel like it understates just how awful one of the graphs is.

A quick literature review of the week: Jonathan Gratus doing differential geometry in pictures (arXiv), Petra Schwer on what it means to do maths (arXiv), Ekaterina Ludgren et al on not being too ambitious (arXiv) and David Cushing et al on an optimal strategy for Guess Who involving paradoxes (Mathematical Gazette) – I gather from Editor Peter Rowlett, they’re always on the lookout for submissions and reviewers.

Loyal DMFT readers will know that I love a deep dive into something that seems unimportant at first glance. Here’s (the) Simon Tatham on a shell history that showed up for a fraction of a second in Tron Legacy.

There’s space here for things I admire but DO NOT LIKE AT ALL. Such as, for instance, Christian Walther’s absolutely cursed QR code.

Also from mastodon, I loved this from Dan Fixes Coin-Ops about how systems fit together (in the middle of an enormous thread about the awesomeness of solar panels): “If all the little bits work how we want them to then the big thing has no choice but to work how we want it to.” I mean, that’s questionable (I’ve worked in software), but Dan’s sheer joy and energy almost has me convinced.

Currently

Fans of aperiodic tilings and beaches, your time is nigh: you want to be in Whitley Bay this weekend (June 6th and 7th) covering the beach with spectres. Check out what’s going on here.

At press time, Fractal Kitty was still putting together Carnival of Mathematics 252 (but by now, who knows? It might be the top post there.) The Carnival takes a month off in the summer, and #253 will be out in early August courtesy of Robin Whitty at Theorem of the Day. You can submit items as always via the Carnival page – and if you’re interested in hosting, please drop me a message. It’s always good to have volunteers rather than to be twisting arms.

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

Talking Maths in… Coventry Transport Museum

By Tom Briggs. Posted May 28, 2026



This is a guest post from museum educator and mathematician Tom Briggs, about his session at last August’s Talking Maths in Public conference.

2025’s Talking Maths in Public (TMiP) conference took place on the Warwick University campus, but the Saturday morning networking and wind-down venue was the fabulous Coventry Transport Museum. A few weeks earlier I’d been asked by the TMiP organising committee if I’d like to offer something related to my work with museums, and I think it’s about time I wrote something about what happened.

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 5A

By Colin Beveridge. Posted May 27, 2026

Double Maths First Thing adds a Holy C

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of figuring things out. Here in Weymouth, we’re sweltering but lucky 12yo is about to jet off to Barcelona for a week of paddleboarding and kayaking (no word about Catalan catamarans, sadly). When I mentioned that we have world-class water sports facilities less than five miles away on Portland, he responded with the single word: churros. Excellent point, well made.

My day was made yesterday by AndyK in the Finite Group, who shared a papal encyclical from earlier this month with the immortal quote:

This concept can also be illustrated by the image of a multifaceted polyhedron, [19] in which the one truth of the Gospel is reflected from different angles.

Fans of the Pseudorandom Ensemble will recognise my excitement that the Pope actually DOES have notes on polytopes.

Links

A couple of unrelated articles: one from 2002 about blind mathematicians and one from 2015 about how efficiently you can run a golf course.

In “more daily games you definitely don’t need”, you might want to figure out a wikipedia article from its tags or to identify a UK station’s three-letter code or learn the basics of cryptic crosswords. Or, you can improve your Yahtzee chances by reading Ioanna Giorgiou’s article about it.

Meanwhile, Andrew Taylor once made a liturgical date-picker, which serves to highlight the absurdity of time as a concept. Since we’re on the topic of terrible things, here’s the aperiodic table. And in correlation/causation news, the longer the Wikipedia article, the bigger the reptile.

Non-Euclidean Dreamer has been drawing links on isometric paper. Love it. At MathsJam last week, we were trying to draw numbers on isometric paper. Print your own isopaper here!

It’s never too early to plan out the last day of term, and I’ve had suggested to me The Train Game (via Math Equals Love), Factors and Multiples from NRICH, and maths escape rooms via Kate Farrell at Data Education in schools*.

Currently

Submit your carnival bits so Sophia of Fractal Kitty can turn them into a post – deadline is before the next DMFT, so chop-chop!

The next Finite Group livestream is on Thursday June 25th, 5pm UK time.

We’re only a week and a half away from Beach Spectres in Whitley Bay (Saturday June 6th and Sunday June 7th).

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

* Corrected 2025-05-27; I incorrectly attributed this to Dr Katherine Holmes. Apologies to both Kates.

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 59

By Colin Beveridge. Posted May 20, 2026

Double Maths First Thing has been blown away by a puzzle

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight in mathematical thinking, in figuring things out, and in doing things that make you feel clever.

Such as – I’m indebted to Miles Gould for encouraging me to dig deeper – The Guardian’s 30,000th cryptic crossword. My dad and my Uncle Bill got me into crosswords as a teenager, and I’ve been tackling the Guardian’s puzzle perhaps as many days as not for the last few decades. I’m not going to spoiler it for you, but I think I can safely reveal that it involves a message they’ve been drip-feeding hidden in plain sight for nearly 18 months, and a final boss with a mic drop that made me grin and cry a little bit.

That’s the sort of feeling I’m trying to spread. Glorious, glorious work.

Links

I’m a fan of proofs without works [Edit 2026-05-20: I meant to write “words” but I also like proofs without works]. Arnaldo Gunzi and Ernée Kozyreff Filho are fans of proof by cardboard. It’s always a treat to see maths made tangible – these are the sorts of things you might see at MathsWorld.

Following on from the puzzles and games from last week, Mair pointed me at another Truchet prototype – it’s a bit hard to make out what’s going on, even from the paper, but I think they’re trying to show that you can’t make a loop of more than 14 tiles out of the 16 in a particular group.

“Select your chess pieces. The app will then place them one by one on an infinite board. The engine follows a spiral path from the center, and each piece is dropped on the first square where it can fit without being captured by any piece of another colour.” I love when simple rules lead to absolute – and I use the word advisedly – chaos.

Ele Willoughby, PhD makes gorgeous lino block prints with scientific themes: this Russell’s Teapot is part of her Imaginary Friends of Science series, and she routinely posts about the birthdays of remarkable women in science.

I was sure I’d mentioned the Bulgarian solitaire before, but a search doesn’t reveal anything. Maybe you should play it?

Currently

If you happen to be in on near London, Somerset House has an MC Escher exhibition running from June 5th to September 6th. If you don’t happen to be in or near London, it’ll still be there, just you’re less likely to be interested.

Also in London, there’s An Evening Of Unnecessary Detail in Greenwich on Monday June 15th from 6:30pm UK time. Looks good, but needs more Pseudorandom Ensemble.

An occasional reminder that Christian Lawson-Perfect and Clare Wallace are running the Beach Spectres weekend in Whitley Bay on the 6th and 7th of June – send me pictures if you go!

A date in the distant future for your diaries: TMiP 2027 will be in Leeds, 26th-28th August. That’s next year, not this year. One of the best conferences around, that is.

As always, you want to join the Finite Group and get distracted in its Discord, and you want to submit interesting maths links to the Carnival so that Fractal Kitty can assemble them into an amazing post.

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

Edited 2025-05-20 to fix a typo. Thanks, Mair!

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 58

By Colin Beveridge. Posted May 13, 2026

Double Maths First Thing is petitioning the weather to be nicer

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in all things mathematical. I had a nice “oho!” moment in class with a student today looking at a question from a Madas paper – it’s subtly different to an “aha!” moment, there’s an element of “I know exactly what you did there and I admire the audacity.”

Links

Talking of exam papers, it feels like futile petitions to the exam board season gets earlier each year. Students have been trying this on – complaining that the paper was a bit hard – since at least 2013 and I honestly have to say “that’s sort of the point of an exam”. I’m not an expert in the Scottish Highers, but I looked through the papers and they looked perfectly reasonable to me (I’ve also looked at expert-on-the-ground Chris Smith’s analysis; I wouldn’t presume to speak for him, but I think it’s safe to say my assessment is similar to his. But I didn’t copy, ok?). For the benefit of any students who happen to read this: there are occasional, fairly rare cases where an exam board makes an egregious error in a paper. These are always picked up quickly and there are processes in place for making sure nobody is disadvantaged. Signing petitions like this is as pathetic as harassing sports referees or using ChatGPT to write an AITA post on reddit. You’d be much better advised emailing Chris ( aap03102 @ gmail . com ) and asking to be on his newsletter list – I imagine there’ll be a detailed breakdown of the papers before long.

An amazing thread on Mathstodon about some of Wolfram|Alpha’s historical hiccups. I think Christian Lawson-Perfect used to run a Twitter bot called Wolfram Alpha Can’t, but I imagine that didn’t make the great exodus.

Here’s Richard Elwes talking about the Rubik’s cube on Numberphile.

In the Mathematical Gazette, there’s an article by Douglas Hofstadter about the role of intuition in maths – I know (journal editor) Peter Rowlett would welcome responses on the topic: gazette @ amie . org . uk . (I keep mistyping it as the Mathematical Gazelle, which is interesting in its own way.)

I’ve not done a games roundup for a while, and a few have recently crossed my path. Here’s Minesweeper, but with a Rock-Paper-Scissors theme; Fractal Kitty has a Truchet tiling puzzle (I LOVE Truchet tiles) and in Lacuno, you play something like a sudoku with shapes. (I found a way to think about it that made it annoyingly straightforward; you might be more lucky.) There’s also the option of practicing your LaTeX skills, which is as appealing to me as sitting in a basement office for three months of the summer and producing a thesis.

Currently

Speaking of Fractal Kitty, Sophia is in charge of the upcoming Carnival; you’ve still got a couple of weeks to submit links to it in the usual place. You can also email me if you fancy having a go at hosting one.

Speaking of games, there’s a Finite Group livestream tomorrow about Wordle, with Scroggs and Ayliean; that’s Thursday May 14th at 8pm UK time.

There’s a special issue of The Mathematics Enthusiast on “Liberal Arts Mathematics”; the deadline in their call for papers is June 1st.

It’s also MathsJam week: get your geek on in any of dozens of settlements around the world, or start your own!

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

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 57

By Colin Beveridge. Posted May 6, 2026

Double Maths First Thing has Youri Tielemans in swaps

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of figuring stuff out.

I’ve been thinking a lot about MathsJam and Parkrun and similar activities, where the point is just showing up and doing the thing – very few people care who finishes their Parkrun first, and the volunteers actively encourage people to walk if they want to. If there’s any competition, it’s about improving your own abilities. MathsJam too, it’s not a competition, it’s about sharing a problem and the struggle with other people who like that sort of thing, maybe learning something new. There’s a certain sort of blowhard that likes to bang on about participation, but participation is how you get people to enjoy things, isn’t it?

Links

Email readers may have missed the exact timing of Ayliean’s stickerbook contribution to the BBC Radio Scotland Breakfast show, which aired at 6:26am (so if you scroll to 26 minutes in, you should hear it.) I’m told that Scroggs was behind some of the calculations.

I’m not a DnD player (yet! growth mindset, Colin, growth mindset), but Dimitri Lozeve is. Calamity befell his group when the DM forgot their dice – Dimitri saved the day with some quick emergency coding that apparently then got out of hand. His Rust code is available here.

Jonny Griffiths has spent several months revising his CAROM powerpoints – it stands for “Creative Activities Resulting in Offbeat Mathematics”, and the goal is to link A-level maths with university topics.

At Maps Mania, there’s a map of all of this century’s solar eclipses, the sort of thing that makes me sigh with pleasure. There are a lot of good posts at that site. Meanwhile, in “things I probably won’t ever get around to watching, but wish I would”, here’s Freya Holmér explaining why you can’t just multiply vectors.

Via Christian Lawson-Perfect’s Interesting Esoterica mathstodon bot, I’ve been reminded of squared squares – one of the people involved in figuring them out was Bill Tutte, one of the first computer-builders – by way of Solomon Golomb’s question: can you tile an infinite plane with squares? I mean, obviously yes, but there’s a catch: every square must have a positive integer side-length, and every positive integer must be used exactly once. That’s not quite so obviously yes, is it? You’d need a hot drink to figure it out – in which case, you’d definitely want some MathsGear coasters.

Currently

Speaking of CLP, if you are, or can arrange to be, anywhere near Whitley Bay on June 6th-7th, you can join him and Clare Wallace in covering the beach with spectre tiles. It’ll be spectracular.

Carnival of Mathematics 251 has arrived, courtesy of Karrie Liu! The next edition is hosted by the legendary Fractal Kitty Sophia, and you can submit relevant posts/videos/content here. (Incidentally, I’ve taken over from Ioanna — another superhero of the maths world — in the role of finding hosts for Carnivals. If you’d like to volunteer to pull together a month’s worth of posts at some unspecified future point, please let me know.)

I’m given to believe that Professor Hannah Fry will be one of the stars of this autumn’s Celebrity Traitors. I’ve been trying very hard not to watch it because I will get sucked in. They’ve added an unnecessary element of challenge, in my opinion.

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

Carnival of Maths 251

By Colin Beveridge. Posted May 1, 2026

The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of April 2026, is now online courtesy of Karrie Liu.



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.