Double Maths First Thing is remembering how icosahedra work.
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy, delight and just satisfaction in doing maths.
This week’s excitement was being mentioned (twice!) in a Stand Up Maths video – it’s embarrassingly recently that I realised the acronym is SUM. That Matt Parker, always one step ahead! I’m engaging a bit with the comments, but largely biting my tongue at people who just… haven’t understood what the project is. (For reference, the project is to use ambient data from a lunar rover’s sensors as a source of randomness for a Monte Carlo estimate of pi. Like we could do on earth. But on the moon. I’m resisting the urge to stop strangers in the street and yell “I’ve designed code that is going to the moon! How cool is that?!“.)
Ahem. Links!
Links
Let’s start with Gwen Fisher’s gorgeous-looking book on beading algorithms, which you can buy here – the toot contains a discount code.
While we’re talking about maths and art, mechatronicsguy has a post about threading a Galton board quincunx to visualise how the binomial distribution works. Why have I replaced Galton board? Even though I have an equation named after me, I’m not a fan of naming things after people generally, and not-very-nice-people especially. Good egg Tony Mann discusses the pros and cons here.
Something I haven’t yet played with, but looks like fun: Polyhedria, a sandbox for building 3D shapes out of regular 3D shapes, like a less-restricted version of Minecraft. I wonder if you could build an icosahedron the size of the moon?
I enjoyed a recent 99% Invisible podcast about finding longitude – I think Dava Sobel’s Longitude was one of the first really good pop-science books I read, along with Paul Hoffman’s The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, the first book I ever got a library fine for. Also in podcasts, there’s a new season of Carry the Two with Sadie Witkowski and Ian Martin.
My friends at Chalkdust – I understand it’s a magazine for the mathematically curious – have released their nominations for Book of the Year 2025. I know at least one DMFT reader is on the shortlist; I wish them all good luck. Which is the same as wishing none of them good luck, I suppose, and just as effective.
Currently
Goodness me, there’s a lot of Currently this week.
Tony has posted this month’s carnival – next month is courtesy of Tom Crawford at Tom Rocks Maths.
Rob Eastaway has a free talk in Manchester tomorrow (Thursday March 12th) at 5pm UK time.
Also tomorrow (4pm UK time), Clemency Montelle is speaking at the INI in Cambridge about How India Shaped The Way We Calculate; it’s a free event and you should be able to click ‘watch live’ to, uh, watch it live.
Get involved with another ridiculous Matt-related maths project – Christian Lawson-Perfect and Clare Wallace’s attempt to turn Great Britain (or at least the beach at Whitley Bay) into a spectr’d isle. That’s happening June 6th-7th. (Christian and Clare are lovely people, if it wasn’t an eight-hour trip from Weymouth, I’d be there.)
Kevin Houston and Costas Loizou are running a free workshop on transitioning into education research, in Leeds and online on Wednesday April 29th. Register by April 17th to attend in-person or by April 22nd to participate remotely.
The Diversity and Decolonisation (D&D) conference takes place at the University of Warwick on Thursday May 7th and Friday May 8th. Registration is free, but you can pay £20 for the conference dinner. Register by Friday March 27th.
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