As part of the 24 Hour Maths Game Show which took place at the end of October 2022, our own Christian Lawson-Perfect designed a maths/games crossover gameshow format to end them all – a mashup of hexagon-fighting TV quiz Blockbusters, and his own personal obsession: interesting mathematical factoids. Welcome to Blockbusters of Interesting Maths!
Next weekend, a group of maths presenters will be getting together some mathematicians, magicians and other cool people to put on a 24-hour long online YouTube mathematical magic $x$-stravaganza. Each half-hour will feature a different special guest sharing a mathematical magic trick of some kind, and across the day there’ll be a total of 48 tricks for you to watch and puzzle over.
As a final update, I’ve now finished my πkm running quest. I’m very tired now! Thanks to everyone who has donated at pikm.run, spread the word about it, come running with me or otherwise facilitated this.
Here’s the final set of photos and video clips from the last week, and for the data fiends among you, a sneaky look at my spreadsheet of runs. With a graph, as requested by Hannah Fry.
I’m still going! Two-thirds of the way through my epic running binge, and I’ve managed to keep it up every day so far. Since my last round-up on 7th, I’ve run another πkm each day, and my fundraising total is now at 22%, which is over £700 (and if you didn’t notice, that sentence just contained ’22’, ‘over’ and ‘7’).
If I can make it to £1000 before the end of the month, I’ll be pretty pleased! Donate at pikm.run, or see below for my daily sweaty photos/videos/instagram posts.
This month I'm doing a completely irrational sponsored run for Sport Relief, aiming to raise £100π by running πkm per day, every day in March. I'm one week in, and here's the story so far.
Inspired by the BBC’s Sport Relief fundraising campaign, I’ve decided to set myself a vaguely mathematical running challenge. My current routine does involve a little running, but nothing serious, so I’ve given myself a bar to aim for that’s both vaguely achievable, and completely irrational.
I’ll aim to run π kilometres (or as close as I can get, with the measuring instruments I have access to) each day during the month of March. This will either be on the treadmill at my gym – in which case I’ll try to get a photo of the ‘total distance’ readout once I’ve finished – or out in the real world, for which I’ll use some kind of running GPS logging device, to provide proof I’ve done it each day. Some days I’ll run on my own, and others I’ll be accompanied by friends/relatives, who’ll be either running as well or just making supportive noises. At the end of the month, I’ll post an update documenting my progress/success/failure.
Serious request: if you know of anywhere in the UK I can reasonably get to where there’s an established circle that’s exactly 1km in diameter, I can try to come and run round the circumference of it. Drop me an email if so.
If you’d like to support my ridiculous plan, you can follow my progress and donate on my fundraising page, or encourage others to do so by visiting pikm.run (I paid £4 for the URL, so now I have to do it). Sport Relief is the even-numbered-years-counterpart of Comic Relief, which together raise money for thousands of projects all over the UK and in the developing world, to help the vulnerable and those in need.