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Double Maths First Thing: Issue 72

By Colin Beveridge. Posted November 11, 2026

Double Maths First Thing has two more sleep until Big MathsJam

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight in doing maths, solving problems, and thinking really hard.

Big MathsJam is almost upon us – I’ll be travelling up to Milton Keynes on Friday and I’ll be talking about Pascal’s Triangle on Saturday afternoon. Maybe I’ll see you there – do say hello!

Apologies to email subscribers who received an incorrectly-numbered newsletter last week. Counting is, as has been well-established, hard.

Links

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they NEED an automatic Lego drawing machine.

Let’s all fawn over Captain Packrat’s slide rule.

Puzzles don’t need to be hard to be enjoyable. But if you’d like something a bit harder, this one’s a doozy.

Here’s Ayliean talking about Truchet tiles, which are among my favourite patterns. Peter Kagey has a nice post that references my article on them from 2018, which feels like a lifetime ago.

And let’s end with a Ben Sparks classic on the golden ratio.

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Issue 24 of Chalkdust Magazine comes out on Friday! I understand the reviews section is especially notable.

Submit your Carnival links for Storm Bear to assemble into the November/December post! Also, let me know if you’d like to host a Carnival in 2027, we’d be very glad to have more hosts!

You should probably be in the Finite Group. There’s a livestream coming up in a few weeks (Thursday November 26th, in which Peter and Ayliean will deconstruct Big MathsJam.)

Rob Eastaway is giving a “more Shakespeare-oriented” version of his Much Ado About Numbers talk at the Covent Garden Actors’ Club on Thursday November 19th at 7pm. Book tickets 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

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 71

By Colin Beveridge. Posted November 4, 2026

Double Maths First Thing dislikes fireworks

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

This week I am mainly rehearsing my Big MathsJam talk and seeing what I can trim out to get it down to five minutes. In likelihood, I’ll do that and find that it takes three in the end. I’m talking about row 0 of Pascal’s triangle and what its graph looks like.

Links

Big news from the OEIS: they’ve decided what should be A400000. It’s a nice sequence. I’m a bit disheartened that the list of winners and honourable mentions comprises (to the best of my judgement) only men. In reading around, it, I stumbled on this lovely fractal on Rémy Sigrist’s page and thought it was worth animating.

A delightfully old-school virtual museum of calculators. In other “mathematically interesting collections” but in the real world, Mair has gone Boole-hunting in Lincoln.

I’m a fan of crosswords, and especially anagrams. This absurd descent into optimisation was right up my street.

Mathober is over. Katie Steckles spent it making zines. Fractal Kitty made beautiful art with fungi, lichen and slime moulds(?!). Did you do something interesting? Let me know!

From the worlds where algorithms rule, a nice bit of topology via Miles and some parenting almost as excellent as toddler maths skills.

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Here’s this month’s TMiP animation collaboration, which appears to be Ben Sparks explaining his process and me dropping in a 15-second clip. Next month’s challenge looks fun.

Sam Hartburn has put together Carnival of Mathematics 256 for our reading pleasure. The next host is Stormy and you can send in links in the usual place.

You probably want to be an element of the Finite Group if you aren’t already.

If you’re an aspiring STEM writer, you should probably apply to ScienceWrite before the deadline on November 9th.

Rob Eastaway is giving a “more Shakespeare-oriented” version of his Much Ado About Numbers talk at the Covent Garden Actors’ Club on Thursday November 19th at 7pm. Book tickets 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

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 70

By Colin Beveridge. Posted October 28, 2026

Double Maths First Thing picked the wrong week to give up Lemsip

Hello! My name is Colin and I am mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of doing, thinking about, playing with and suffering from mathematics. I am not on a mission to suffer from a cold the week I’m meant to be recording an album, but here we are.

I’m also emerging from a cloud of too much work, which is likely related to the lurgy. Hopefully I can put some more time into doing maths I enjoy over the next few weeks. Big MathsJam is but weeks away; I’ve sketched out my talk and I’m looking forward to tormenting people about the zeroth row of Pascal’s triangle.

Links

Now, I’ve had a huge uptick in developers emailing me links and vouchers for daily puzzle games and I don’t have the time or energy to figure out which ones are worth looking at. Daily games might still feature here, but cold emails are not the way to promote them to me. The way to get my attention is to get someone I trust to mention them in the group chat, like Primaries did. That’s a very frustrating game. Same goes for ObsQRity.

The Pudding has done the network analysis and determined that Kevin Bacon is not the centre of the (Hollywood) universe. No word on Erdős.

In “friends of DMFT” news, I would like to draw your attention to Katie Steckles Curious Cases AND SEPARATELY the BBC front page (the latter with scripting help from Tom Briggs). Darren Macey and Lucy Rycroft-Smith at the RSS have a report on how to assess statistics in schools. And Jonny Griffiths has a free fiction book with tessellation themes.

One of my favourite newsletters is Soph Warnes’s Fair Warning; this week’s issue pointed me at two good maps: a gazetteer of American literature (which somehow doesn’t include Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance in Bozeman, Montana) and an animation of Amsterdam publishers mentioned in popular songs. (Of course, if you’re interested in my songs and ramblings about them, you can always sign up to my folksinger newsletter.)

If you’ve been to MathsWorld and thought “I wish I could get a job here!”, you might consider applying to be an Enabler.

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Kit Yates is talking at the Stratford Literary Festival on November 1st, 2-3pm UK time.

Light Night Leeds is maths-themed this year, tonight and tomorrow (28th and 29th October) from 6:30pm.

Sam Hartburn is hosting this month’s Carnival of Mathematics and (I imagine) would love to see any links you post. She’s also running the TMiP Animation Collaboration, and you’d do well to get your FRACTALS animations to her by the end of the month.

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 6F

By Colin Beveridge. Posted October 21, 2026

Double Maths First Thing is all a bit chaotic

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to find and share the joy in maths, puzzles and working things out.

I’m likely to have some availability for new students in the next few months, so if you know of anyone who needs A-level help, feel free to send them my way!

Links

Hope Duncan at the University of Leeds has a new podcast, Unapologetic Mathematicians, available via Spotify, Apple and RSS; I imagine wherever you get your podcasts will have it. The first episode features Richard Elwes, who apparently never sleeps. Also in podcasts, here’s Tom Briggs talking about maths in museums. As if he ever stops.

Have you ever wanted a fractal jumper? No, I’d never considered it either, but now I do. They’re not outrageously-priced, but they are in dollars. There’s a paper about it here and I’m going to bug Alison Kiddle about the possibilities at Big MathsJam. WHICH IS LESS THAN A MONTH AWAY AAAAAH!

Moule pointed me at this outrageous OEIS entry. Thanks, Moule!

Katie Steckles is making zines for Mathober, which is coordinated by Fractal Kitty.

I’m told Celebrity Traitors is compulsory viewing, but I’m not falling for THAT. Nor am I getting nerdsniped by that Hannah Fry. Nor by that Sophie Maclean.

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Lots of mathematical content at AEoUD at the RI on Saturday, October 24th from 7pm – I believe in-person tickets are £20, or pay-what-you-can for the livestream.

Light Night Leeds is maths-themed this year, next Wednesday and Thursday (28th and 29th October) from 6:30pm.

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 6E

By Colin Beveridge. Posted October 14, 2026

Double Maths First Thing had to look up where Wells is

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight in the beauty of maths, and the human effort of figuring things out.

This week I’ve been taking joy in simplifying and clarifying code that wasn’t quite right last time it was deployed. With a bit of space and distance, I was able to see a neater way of dealing with the edge cases and – even better – a neater way of explaining what was going on.

Meanwhile, everyone has been begging, begging me to share videos of the Pseudorandom Ensemble’s triumphant show at MathsWorld. Sam Hartburn has been diligently putting clips together.

Correspondence from .mau., who reports that the Italian for puzzle is rompicapo – like in French, “breaking the head”. I suppose “brainteaser”, “mind-bender” and “head-scratcher” are the closest English equivalents.

Links

Margaret Hamilton has died, aged 90. It genuinely hadn’t occurred to me that she might still be alive. There are some people who are science heroes, and some who accomplished jaw-dropping feats; Hamilton is in the latter camp for me. She – her code – landed those blokes on the moon, automatically putting things right after something went wrong, using less computing power than is in my car key. I believe it was her code that Lorenz interrupted on the way to coming across chaos theory. She invented the term ‘software engineering’. I applaud her memory.

Ele Willoughby, PhD is an excellent person to follow in the fediverse; I’m forever learning about an obscure-to-me scientist and gawping at her gorgeous linocuts. This week, my attention was grabbed by Mary Golda Ross.

Important knitting news: mathematicians have invented a stitch that stops mistakes from spreading. Unfortunately it appears only to work in knitting; it would be super-useful to have in science generally.

A quick game of good map, bad map. (Every time I look at the bad map, I blink several times and walk slowly away).

And finally, here’s Richard Elwes talking about polyhedra.

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Richard Elwes, you say? The man is everywhere. In particular, he’s in… Somerset? Talking big numbers at the Wells Literary Festival this Sunday October 18th at 4:15pm. Tickets are £12.50.

Brigitte Stenhouse is talking about Mary Somerville. Apparently that’s just a fair bet at any given moment in time, but she’ll be doing it specifically at the LSE in London this evening, Wednesday October 14th at 6:30pm. Tickets are free.

Next week is MathsJam week around the world, typically on Tuesday October 20th. Sadly, Weymouth is on hiatus for the foreseeable future; maybe I’ll get to visit some others instead.

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 6D

By Colin Beveridge. Posted October 7, 2026

Double Maths First Thing is tangled up in knots

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

This week I have been in error-recovery mode after drawing a wrong conclusion on a consulting project. Compared to Chris Lewicki’s classic, it wasn’t a disaster, but it’s still going to take a bit of work to put right. I’ve been very carefully modelling “how to respond when you screw something up” to the rest of the team; own the mistake, figure out the root cause, and do all you can to put it right.

Links

Eyal Weiss has been in touch with a demonstration of the Parrondo paradox, two losing games that, played alternately, are a winning game. His Wonderlattice site is full of cool experiments. Have a play! Another lovely gave via Ben Cornish about knot theory. (I love that the French for puzzle is ‘casse-tête’, or ‘head-breaker’.)

Also in games: suggestions on how to use HexSum in the classroom.

Why did the beach cry? Because of dear friends Ayliean and Elizabeth making terrible jokes about the maths of seaweed.

I enjoyed this short thread about a developer spending decades fixing a perspective bug that bothered them under very restrictive conditions.

And finally, a drama I missed at the time: a mysterious mathematician popping up on Math.SE with solutions to very hard integrals. Turned out to be a physicist trolling the mathematicians, because of course it did.

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Ben Leis’s Carnival post is up! You can submit your links for Sam Hartburn to assemble here. If you’re interested in hosting a Carnival (receive links, make blog post after a month), reply to this message and let me know! It’s a nice way to show up in the maths community.

The playlist for September’s Animation Generation Collaboration is out, showing two very different ways of animating a proof without words. If you want to join in for October, you can find all the details at https://talkingmathsinpublic.uk/animation/

Brigitte Stenhouse is talking about Mary Somerville. Apparently that’s just a fair bet at any given moment in time, but she’ll be doing it at the LSE in London on Wednesday October 14th at 6:30pm. Tickets are free.

Katie Steckles and Ben Sparks are running a pair of two-day Maths Communication training workshops in
Edinburgh (November 23rd-24th) and Bristol (February 24th-25th 2027).

Also in Edinburgh, Madeleine Shepherd has an exhibition involving mathematically-themed textiles in Coburg Street until Sunday October 11th.

The next Finite Group live stream is on Sunday evening (8pm UK time, October 11th) and is all about random numbers.

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 6C

By Colin Beveridge. Posted September 30, 2026

Double Maths First Thing is fair drawing in.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight in doing and talking (and singing) about maths.

This week I’m in the undelightful state of “writing up maths I’ve already done”, which is preventing me from doing new maths. I don’t like it.

Links

Fractal Kitty is responsible for the Mathober prompts.

Maths Week England is barely six weeks away, and starts on my birthday. This year, they’re running a prize competition for maths in libraries (which there should be more of).

My favourite paper of the week: An Abundance Of Katherines: The Game Theory of Baby Naming, by Katy Blumer, Kate Donahue, Katie Fritz, Kate Ivanovich, Katherine Lee, Katie Luo, Cathy Meng, and Katie Van Koevering.

Katie Steckles is not an author, but she has pointed me at a daily game called Trace, which I refuse to engage with on “already having too many daily games” grounds. Ben Cornish points me a Wikipedia exploration game which I also have too little time for.

While DMFT’s official position is “in this household, we don’t care about AI”, we’ve got a paper by Chaim Goodman-Strauss explaining the maths of a recently-discovered three-dimensional monotile, Chair44. @Danpiker has animated the tessellation. I’ve not tried to follow it, because of the aforementioned position. Sometimes it makes things much easier if you decide not to care.

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If you’ve got Carnival links for Ben Leis, the deadline is fast approaching. Send ’em in here. Next month’s host is Sam Hartburn…

… Who (among many other things, such as being a fabulous human) runs the TMiP animation collaboration, the September edition of which is drawing to a close – if you’ve got an animation about PROOFS WITHOUT WORDS, you’ve only got a few days. October’s prompt is FRACTALS.

Next week: Dr Volker Remmert is speaking about “What do you need a mathematician for? as the BSHM Gresham Lecture in central London from 5:30pm on October 7th.

Richard Elwes is talking big numbers at the Wells Literary Festival on Sunday October 18th at 4:15pm. Tickets are £12.50.

If you’re an aspiring STEM writer, you should probably apply to ScienceWrite before the deadline on November 9th.

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