Double Maths First Thing is not stirring.
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in mathematical creativity. It’s Christmas Eve (babe), which means I probably need to switch off from looking out for cool maths and spend some time with the close family and/or tidying up the house before the extended version thereof arrives. No time for chit-chat! Links to share!
Links
One of my guilty pleasures is a roguelike deckbuilder called Slay the Spire. I am terrible at it, but it scratches several itches – being from Scotland, I appreciate winning a lot more if it comes after a long series of defeats, and StS is not an easy game to win. It’s also full of interesting maths, including things you can deduce from the random number generation and finding provably unwinnable games.
A much more winnable game that Owen Lacey protests too much about not watching is Are You The One. He has analysed the strategy involved and given a neat run-down of the information theory involved. Lovely stuff.
Another game I’m terrible at is code golf – I can occasionally come up with a python one-liner that looks like magic, but the hard-core “fewest bytes possible” is beyond me. Some superhumans, specifically Peter Norvig, play it with regexes. More my speed is Scroggs’s Christmas regex puzzle from last year.
I have frequently been accused of knowing nothing, and one of the things I know nothing about is zero-knowledge proofs. Fortunately, there is a paper about explaining them to children (I acknowledge that the framing is possibly problematic, but it’s from the olden days when they didn’t know any better). I mention them because of a cool and useful application: a privacy-preserving check on whether someone has been vaccinated against measles.
Yesterday, I had fun introducing a student to the big trig fig. Turns out you can also use cosines to code up fizzbuzz.
Currently
I mean, currently I barely know what day it is. Is it the last day of Scroggsvent? Who knows.
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