It’s now been a year since I took over the puzzle column at New Scientist and turned it into the BrainTwisters column. By way of celebration, I thought I’d write up an interesting bit of maths behind one of the puzzles, which I made a note of at the time and have been meaning to share.
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Double Maths First Thing: Issue 10
Because there’s really no excuse for ho-ho-ho-CAH-TOA
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy and delight, without recourse to magical reindeer.
Somewhat embarrassingly, I’ve shown up for class outside of term-time but then… so have you. Let’s make the most of it!
This week’s pictures
Let’s start with a fun picture. Ed Brims — beekeper-magician, which is a job title I never knew I wanted — has constructed an Euler diagram of which characters in Beatrix Potter show up in the same story, and it turns out looking like Jemima Puddle-duck. Splendid stuff.
Another nice, but significantly different visualisation: Raffi Hotter (who is not, to the best of my knowledge, an otter from the world of Beatrixp), has a really lovely tool for plotting spherical harmonics.
One of the many things on my to-learn list for 2025 is some music theory. A good starting point might be Roeland Hollander‘s article on the geometry of scales.
Various other links
You’ve probably heard the claim that Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer. But you probably haven’t looked in detail at what Note G actually did. Luckily, this piece by Sinclair Target at two-bit history examines that closely, and gives a run-down of the competing claims about Lovelace.
I’m somewhat interested in the intersection between maths and fiction (I can neither confirm nor deny that I’m working on some short stories for 8-12 year olds); if you are, you might find Alex Kasman’s database of mathematical fiction.
Over at Mathstodon, John Carlos Baez is spreading the word about pi’s evil twin, the lemniscate constant.
Festive nonsense
As a grudging concession to Christmas, I’ll link to the Finite Group and friends doing a flawless(?) Secret Santa and send out a last call for Scroggsvent — I’m happy to report that I got three wrong first time out but have now completed the puzzle and saved Christmas; I believe you have until the end of the year to take part if you want to be in with the chance of a prize.
I understand it’s also Hanukkah imminently. I didn’t know until quite recently that the chocolate coins in one’s stocking are more of a Hanukkah tradition than a Christmas one: they’re used for playing a game of luck called dreidel. Apparently — and I have no personal position on this — it’s a terrible game.
That’s all I’ve got for this year! Thanks for sticking with me, there will me more to come in the new year. In the meantime, 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
A New Sequence!
Or The Novice’s Guide To Achieving Mathematical Immortality
This is a guest post from Barney Maunder-Taylor.
A great way to achieve mathematical immortality is to solve an outstanding open question, like determining if \( \pi+e \) is rational or irrational, or finding a counterexample to the Goldbach Conjecture. But for most of us, a more realistic approach would be to contribute a new sequence to the Online Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences, the OEIS. This is the tale of one mathematician’s quest to do just that – with ideas to help YOU to contribute a sequence of your own.
Last-minute Mathematical Gifts
If you’ve got a mathematical friend you need to buy a Christmas gift for but have left it too late, here’s some suggestions for what you could get them, drawn from things our friends are doing (that don’t need you to wait for something to arrive in the post).
Double Maths First Thing: Issue F
Double Maths First Thing is the biscotti to your Wednesday morning coffee
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in maths.
This week’s links
I have a difficult relationship with AI. I wrote about it here. tl;dr: it doesn’t fill me with joy and delight, although it can sometimes be useful. However, an interesting use case is in the ongoing and enormous project to formalise mathematics — using machine verification to find mistakes and gaps in proofs (or to say “yep, that’s legit!” when things do work). Via Harlan Carlens, here’s a piece about the use of AI in tackling the IMO. Something that strikes me as slightly more useful is formalising the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Possibly, but not closely, related: an article about playing chess with God; I’m mainly disappointed about the lack of a “… moves in mysterious ways” joke.
In MathsJam-adjacent news, my esteemed friend Barney Maunder-Taylor took the puzzle “what is the smallest number n such that the digit sums of both n and n+1 are multiples of 7?” and turned it into an OEIS entry. I’ve done some proving around it, but have a play yourself. It’s nice!
In a rare concession to Christmas, here is a video about making cut-and-paste Christmas trees — there are PDFs linked, but the author asks that they not be distributed directly.
Lastly, there’s a live-stream about regexes for paid-up Finite Group members on Friday 20th, 8pm UK time. The Discord group is a lovely space (and I believe you can hang out there on the free tier). For me, it’s a Patreon worth supporting.
That’s all I’ve got this week! In the meantime, 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 E
Double Maths First Thing is like a colossal hedgehog overlooking Catania airport.
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in maths.
One person who did that, tirelessly and relentlessly, was my dear friend Adam Atkinson, who died a few days ago. He had been ill for some time. He was an absolute giant of the recreational maths community, an incredibly clever and generous chap, and he’ll be sorely missed wherever geeks gather. Here’s his Heavy Boots story from G4G in 2016.
This week’s links
I was reminded recently of the shameful treatment mathematicians have meted out to ants over the decades, and Sam Hartburn‘s efforts to highlight and put a stop to them. Her song, The Ant’s Lament is part of that campaign.
Someone else who mistreated ants terribly — forcing them to crawl around Möbius strips, etc., was Dutch artist M. C. Escher. I’m eagerly waiting for the library to get hold of Visions of Symmetry by another G4G legend, Doris Schattschneider.
Escher spent some time at the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain; I was delighted to read recently that all 17 wallpaper groups have been discovered there, although I understand that this claim is not uncontroversial.
Someone who, to the best of my knowledge, has never mistreated an ant is Julia Evans; she has, however, produced a large number of zines on computer science topics, many of which have maths subtexts; my favourite blog posts of hers are No feigning surprise and A-A testing, a smart idea that’s quite obvious once it’s explained clearly.
That’s all I’ve got this week! In the meantime, 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 234
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of November 2024, is now online at Theorem of the Day.
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.