Maths Week England happened a couple of weeks ago. I had put my name on the speaker directory, and sure enough a maths lead from a primary school in County Durham emailed me to ask if I could go in and do something for them.
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Double Maths First Thing: Issue 41
Double Maths First Thing is making a list but not checking it.
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy and delight, even when I’m not feeling much of either. December is a tough month for me: routines get broken, I have to be sociable, and there isn’t enough daylight.
Now I’ve somewhat recovered from Big MathsJam, I’m happy to report that I had a whale of a time there – the new venue being a couple of hours closer helped me a lot. I think my highlights were Kristin Ohlmann’s talk about decorating a unicycle, Ally Stanley’s bit on trying to ride every tube line as fast as possible, and Scroggs doing Scroggs things with a squared-square puzzle.
It was also pointed out to me that by posting periodically at the Aperiodical, I’m subverting the good name of the site. I argue that there’s a glitch in the periodicity every time we change the clocks, so it’s not quite periodical.
Links
Since we’re on the subject of unicycles, Declan Chidlow answers some frequently-asked questions.
Robin Houston has posted a dissection puzzle, a variation on one I love.
In “things that are lovely to play with” news, here is a very satisfying Voronoi diagram generator and a thing that goes boing. You might also want to see how quickly you can draw a cool S.
I enjoyed a post by Alistair Bird about – with a certain degree of nominative determinism – pigeonholes
And I was intrigued to learn there’s a fairly simple version of the four-colouring problem that’s unsolved: the earth-moon problem. I imagine there are many equally-simple unsolved problems in that field.
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December is, of course, advent calendar season. Which means it’s nearly Christmas, and something terrible has happened in the Scroggsverse. There’s a shortened Advent of Code, as well as an Advent of Maths. Meanwhile, DMFT favourite Karen Campe has dug up an old Calendar of Problems.
New month, new Carnival: Tom Briggs is this month’s ringmaster. Sanjeev at The Scribble Board is in charge next month, and you can submit articles (or videos, or whatever you like) for it here.
I’ve also got my hands on the new Chalkdust magazine, including Mats Vermeeren’s write-up of my highlight of last Big MathsJam and Donovan Young explaining entropy. Plus the “famously fiendish” crossnumber.
Katie Steckles will be giving the Liverpool Maths Society Newstead Memorial Christmas Lecture about fractals on Tuesday, December 9th, 1:30pm in the Sherrington Building at the University of Liverpool. Go along and tell her she’s awesome, or simply buy some of the 15 minute maths activities she’s developed with Alison Kiddle.
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 246
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of November 2025, is now online at TomMaths.
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.
Double Maths First Thing: Issue 40
DMFT reckons it must be downhill from here
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to find and disseminate the joy in doing maths, solving puzzles and getting to the root of things in general.
I’m back from an excellent weekend at Big MathsJam, and now rather sad that I have to make my own breakfast and nobody’s saying “have you seen this cool thing?” Bah. (I’m still recovering. I’ll write up my highlights in the next issue).
Links
I had some small involvement with the maths trail at MathsWorld, despite having no background other than following town trails with the kids. I wish I’d known about this paper by Mary L Dalton and Jennifer Yantz, or this helpful gloss from Mykyta Kliapets.
Firmly in the “to read one day” pile is an article by Kenneth E Iverson (who created APL) about how notation shapes how you think.
A delightful thing: the Steinhaus longimeter, a grid on a transparency for measuring the length of a curve by counting how many times it crosses a grid line. Chris Staecker has a page describing a whole batch of “antique” calculating devices.
Also delightful, an interview with Andrew Wiles in Plus, from nearly a decade ago – with the quote “this is what we live for, these moments that create illumination and excitement”. Spot on!
My mental arithmetic is rustier than it was – it’s still good enough to make people swear at me when I get trig questions right in my head – but here’s a technique I didn’t know about for mental division by Daniel Timms.
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Tomorrow, Thursday November 27th, there’s a Finite Group live stream about the maths of robots. I always enjoy catching up on these with young Bill.
We’re almost at the end of the month, which means a Carnival is imminent. Tom Briggs is in the hot-seat, and you can still send him things via the Carnival submission page.
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
Beach Spectres update – I’ve made a big tile!
Here’s an update on my progress in the Beach Spectres project. I’ve put out two update videos since the last post but failed to write a post here. I promise I’m trying my best to be more organised than usual!
Double Maths First Thing: Issue 3F
Double Maths First Thing needs to collect its tickets, don’t let it forget.
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of maths as far and wide as possible.
This week, I’m steeling myself up for a double whammy of a long train journey and trusting the computer shop to repair my power supply, both of which are enormously stressful.
Links
I’m not on BlueSky (I lose enough time to mathstodon, thank you very much), but some of the prolific ex-Twitterers are still doing whatever you do on BlueSky these days. Andrew Stacey has collated what he thinks is a complete collection of Catriona Agg’s geometry puzzles. Catriona is a superstar. Andrew’s a good egg, too.
In the good place, Amapanda cracks her knuckles and finds the towns furthest from a Wetherspoons. The interesting thing for me is the discussion about “what does town mean?” and “what does furthest mean?”.
Modelling sport mathematically always seems fraught with problems – the difficulty with humans is that they get all emotional and don’t follow the model – but Gabel and Redner have found that they can model “essentiall all statistical features of basketball” with a random walk model. Cool!
Need a random number and don’t have a die to hand? Jon Bentley in Programming Pearls has some ways you can code something up, assuming you’re too good for random.random().
Finally, a puzzle game: Ain’t It Funny How The Knight Moves?, a challenge to visit every square on the board that isn’t attacked by a queen.
Currently
There may be a few tickets left for Big MathsJam in Milton Keynes this weekend (November 21-23) – online attendance is available and I’m pretty sure that if you like DMFT, you’ll love MathsJam.
I’ve not yet got my hands on a copy of the new Chalkdust magazine (I’ll put that right this weekend), but on Tuesday 25th their book club will be discussing Matt Parker’s Humble Pi.
You’ll want to submit anything for the next Carnival of Maths, hosted by Tom Briggs, via the Carnival submission page.
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 3E
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of getting stuck into maths.
Let’s start with a lovely quote from Karen Uhlenbeck:
“I think you can’t do mathematics without the ability to concentrate. But also, that’s where the fun is, the rest of the world fades away and it’s you and the mathematics. And I think there isn’t any other way to do mathematics.”
That state of flow is the Best Thing. Onto the links!
Links
I used to love taking part in National Novel Writing Month, and was sad to see that it had declined and closed amid scandals and controversy. I’m pleased to learn that there is a National Novel Generating Month, and that Liza Daly has generated a book made of the numbers 1 to 50,000.
Reader Maria has written in to let me – and, indirectly, you – know about a new children’s book from Allison Bishop and Sasha Fradkin called Modultown (a sequel to Funville Adventures). It has already been fully-funded on Kickstarter, and will be available under a Creative Commons licence. Learn more here! There’s a shortage of good maths books for kids. The one I’m working on is getting ever closer to done…
There was a daring heist at the Louvre recently. I was surprised to learn that the rumour about the password to the security system being ‘louvre’ is not yet listed as debunked by Snopes, although they haven’t been able to prove it, either. Meanwhile, here’s Katie Steckles on how to cover a gallery with cameras and a more topical version from Kit Yates.
Apparently there’s a Christmas coming up soon. While I am firmly on Team Humbug, there’s some neat maths involved in some of it – especially Secret Santa. It’s covered in my favourite Christmas book, by Hannah Fry and Thomas Oleron Evans.
Lastly, here’s a piece in Chalkdust by Eleanor Doman about where surnames go to die.
Currently
What’s Chalkdust? Why, it’s a magazine for the mathematically curious. New issue out on Monday November 17th.
That’s during Maths Week England, which launches this Saturday, November 15th at MathsWorld in Southwark. Some cracking speakers on that line-up, including Sam Hartburn and Rob Eastaway.
Also also, Tuesday November 18th is the traditional local MathsJam day – as usual, find yours or start one yourself. Big MathsJam is just around the corner, too.
Can’t get moving for “currently” this week. On top of all that excitement, we’ve just started Season 9 of the Mathematical Objects podcast, one of very few podcasts I’ve listened to every episode of.
And finally, don’t forget to send pieces of mathematical joy for Tom to collate into the next Carnival of Mathematics.
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