Double Maths First Thing is singing powerful songs
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy, delight and frustration of doing maths. Welcome to episode 50! That’s excitement, not factorial.
I enjoyed the latest episode (other sources available) of A Problem Squared, to the point that I did a whole bunch of mental arithmetic while running with Pete and got several impressively correct answers by making a series of impressive blunders that happened to cancel out.
This week I’m doing more singing than I usually do – folk sessions and open mics and Pseudorandom Ensemble rehearsals, while simultaneously trying to learn to play bass guitar. How hard can it be?
Links
Of course there’s some maths in bass guitar. Where do the frets go? Over at Chalkdust, Ally Dowson and Matt Burdynowski discuss the links between maths and music generally.
From music theory to game theory: can you outsmart the computer in a bidding game? I played once, won, and walked away feeling a bit grubby. It reminds me a bit of Colonel Blotto’s game, which in turn pointed me at the delightfully-titled Goofspiel.
A mystery solved on Mathstodon this week: what on earth is the Unicode character Angzarr? A right angle with a downward zig-zag arrow over it, it’s taken four years for someone to find that it represents the azimuth. I love that sort of puzzle.
Following on from a recent theme of doing mathematics for good, Quanta has a nice write-up on applied category theory, which John Carlos Baez and many others hope can do something to keep the planet habitable.
Also in doing good – or rather, working to a baseline of decency and consideration – the TMiP group chat sourced several good links about making websites and other materials accessible, including a British Sign Language glossary for data science terms, an accessiblility checklist for events maintained by Christian Lawson-Perfect, suggestions on how to make your maps better, and a tool for checking your colour contrast. Talking of CLP, he’s written a post to celebrate a decade of Is This Prime?.
Finally, I owe Sam Hansen an apology: I took my information about Carry the Two from an old website and was surprised and delighted to find that they had returned as co-host for series three. I’ve now listened to the first episode. It’s good! (You’ll notice that I didn’t actually deliver the apology I owe.)
Currently
It’s another big currently week! As usual, all times are UK. I was about to say GMT before realising some of them will be post-clock-change.
There’s a Finite Group livestream on Friday 20th March at 4pm, featuring Katie Steckles and guest Kat Phillips (both of whom are terrific).
Tuesday coming (March 24th) is the traditional day for local MathsJams around the world; do start your own if there isn’t one near you – or join the online ‘Jam by emailing Alex.
Don’t forget to submit your links for Carnival of Mathematics 250 at the Carnival page so Tom Crawford can collate them into a coherent show.
Coming up the following week, you’re going to have to choose between Alison Kiddle talking about the maths of knitting at MathsWorld in London (Tuesday March 31, 6:15pm) and the Chalkdust pop maths book club (same day, 6:30pm) – they’ll be discussing Tom Briggs’s The Mathematician’s Library.
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