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Double Maths First Thing: Issue 31

By Colin Beveridge. Posted August 13, 2025

Double Maths First Thing feels like this rubber band is getting longer.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in maths.

This week I’m mainly on childcare duty and watching the calendar until I can pick up a new weather project in September. As always, I’m interested in unusual and quirky maths projects (especially ones that do some good for the planet or the people on it), so hit me up if you feel like a mathematician/developer/writer woud be a good investment.

Links

This week, Ayliean, the Fringe’s hardest-working pretend showhand has a question from her mum (hi, Lorna!) – can a shape be a shape if it’s really three shapes? What we’ve got here are three quornettos – each made of four cones joined together at the base in a loop. The three of them then fit together in a very pleasing way to form a triquornetto that my autistic fingers are LONGING to turn inside out over and over for hours. Ayliean suspects they’re linked to the flexagon family – this I know from nothing, but I wonder if any loyal readers can help?

Three crocheted(?) toys, each made of four cones joined into a loop at the base. They look a bit like Wombles when they're Up To Something.

The three quornettos join together to make a ball with a six-pointed star on either side.

Tired of the platonic solids? You’ll be wired about the parallelohedra, of which there are also five, but all of which tile Euclidean space in three dimensions. (Via 0xDE on Mathstodon).

A nice problem from reddit: you roll n n-sided dice and tally up how many of each number you roll – so if you rolled six D6s and got 6-4-1-6-6-1, you’d have three 6s, two 1s and a 4 – 6 is the outright winner. What’s the probability of the result being a tie as n gets large? (I have an experimental answer, but not a theoretical one.)

There’s a new season of Sam Hansen and Sadie Witkowski’s Carry the Two podcast, which is focussing on emerging technologies this time – episode 1 is about quantum computing. In related news, this game looks like some people might find it fun.

And in “articles I want to read but likely never will”, here’s an article about using graph theory to write more efficient code.

Currently

Tomorrow (Thursday August 14th, 10am UK time), there’s a Finite Group livestream on space-filling curves. I hope there’ll be a flowsnake!

Tuesday coming (Tuesday August 19th), it’s the traditional day for your local MathsJam – follow that link to find it, or for details on how to start your own.

And if you’re coming to Talking Maths in Public, I hope you’ll be able to join us in the Ensemble Room at Warwick Arts Centre for the Pseudorandom Ensemble show on Wednesday evening. There’ll be a link to reserve a seat in your conference pack, with a suggested contribution of a fiver to help cover costs. It’ll be a blast!

Lastly, I’m hosting this month’s Carnival of Maths – that link is the one to send any interesting and/or important articles to.

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,

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 7

By Colin Beveridge. Posted October 23, 2024

Double Maths First Thing is part of Colin’s fight against the forces of tedium.

Hello, and welcome to Double Maths First Thing! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician, on a mission to spread joy and delight in maths.

More from me

I promise not to make this whole thing about me, but if I’ve got a blog post about something I find delightful, it would be rude not to share it. Here’s a link that took me a long time to make about the relationship between the binomial expansion and the binomial distribution. The clue’s in the name, right?

New Largest Known Prime!(?)

I am decidedly ambivalent about finding larger and larger Mersenne primes. I feel like some of those involved in the hunt are in it for the money, the mersennaries. Even if it’s been six years since the last one, the announcement that there’s a new one is not one that thrills me. I think throwing more compute at the same problem is of limited use. However, it has reminded me about the Lucas-Lehmer test, which is a very nice piece of maths that happens to coincide with the structure of computers, making it efficient (although still lengthy) to calculate.

Some people who are less cynical than me:

Ayliean
Matt

A load of balls

Somewhere deep in the list of tabs that seemed like a good idea to open, I found instructions for making a giant windball. It uses some sort of construction kit called makedo, but I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find some butterfly pins and spare cardboard.

I was surprised by a result, which is always a nice feeling: if you’re thinking about balls (settle down back there), you’d expect to see \( \pi \) show up. Finding \( e \) was not on my bingo card.

I was also surprised to find that the word dodecicosacron in FractalKitty’s Mathober challenge was not a typo, but the sort of spiky shape you would avoid in a video game.

Stretching the theme still further, I hadn’t heard of Pappus’s centroid theorem(s), which you could use to work out the volume of a sphere (see! There is a link!) — they’re reasonably obvious once you think about them a little, but it’s still a nice way to approach surfaces and volumes of revolution.

Other nice things!

From Reddit, probably to be filed under “absurd but also very impressive”: a computer cuber broke a world record. Not just any world record, but the record for a 121-by-121-by-121 cube. By 69 hours. My understanding is that a 121-cube is just like a 5-cube, only more so — but still, the concentration and dedication you’d need to do that… chapeau! Oh, and they say this is the fifth-largest cube ever solved by a human.

Over on the platform-still-referred-to-as-Twitter-by-everyone-sensible, David K Butler has an interesting way to look at addition and multiplication using parallel and intersecting lines (respectively). I’m always up for a new thing to add to my mental models!

In podcast news, I am given to believe that Sam Hansen is at it again. I’m not sure they ever stopped, honestly; Sam and Sadie Witkowski now co-host Carry The Two, recently with a theme of elections and representation. It’s almost enough to get me to the gym so I can listen to it in peace. Almost.

And — if you’re quick about it — you might be able to subscribe to the Finite Group in time for their first anniversary livestream.

In the meantime, 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 right here at the Aperiodical.

That’s all for this week! 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 I should be aware of.

Until next time,