Double Maths First Thing only exports lost puffins Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight, and to find excuses to do interesting maths. (If you could use an interesting mathematician — for the purpose of solving problems, slinging code, writing content or making the…
Aperiodical News Roundup – March 2025
Here’s a round-up of some mathematical and maths-related news that happened in March 2025 that we didn’t otherwise cover on the site.
Double Maths First Thing: Issue 1E
Double Maths First Thing picked the wrong week to give up calculus. Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of doing mathematical things. It’s nice to finally be in a new month after April 1st was cancelled again, the 32-day March always catches…
5. Mathematics of the “I Ching”
I’m aperiodically working my way through Martin Gardner’s cover images from Scientific American, the so-called Gardner’s Dozen, attempting to recreate these in the LaTeX drawing package TikZ. View the previous attempts. This time I chose January 1974. The cover image relates to the article ‘The combinatorial basis of the “I Ching,” the Chinese book of…
Double Maths First Thing: Issue 1D
Double Maths First Thing just doesn’t know any more Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread delight and joy in doing maths for the sake of it. This week I have mainly been figuring out the mechanics of the Bokeh library so I can make it draw graphs. It’s…
Double Maths First Thing, Issue 1C
Double Maths First Thing cannot currently take your call. Please leave a message after the beep. Beep. Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy and delight. This week, I am mainly swearing at Scroggs and his fiendish crossnumber in the current issue of Chalkdust Magazine. He’s also written an…
Double Maths First Thing: Issue 1B
Double Maths First Thing thinks ISO8601’s great Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy — I almost misspelt “mathematical” as “mayhem”, so let’s have a bit of that, too. I spent much of the weekend with a secret cabal of mathematical musicians at an undisclosed…