Double Maths First Thing just doesn’t know any more
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread delight and joy in doing maths for the sake of it.
This week I have mainly been figuring out the mechanics of the Bokeh library so I can make it draw graphs. It’s really neat! (Now drawing graphs is a service I offer at a reasonable consulting rate.)
I’ve also been making progress with blindfold cubing — I managed a successful solve on the bluetooth cube in under 5:30, which is slower than I’d like; however, there’s plenty of time until the competition to get quicker and more reliable. (Talking of cubing, there’s a wealth of data available here.)
Links
Frank Lantz loves SET in a different way to how I do. If you don’t own it, you can get it from MathsGear for a tenner or so (UK).
Here’s an interesting (but ultimately, unsatisfying) article from Quanta via Wired about a new kind of hash table. I think my problem with this kind of article is that I want to know a bit more about the detail and a bit less about how it made people go wow.
Much more in-depth: this one’s about different sorts of means.
Finally, a curiosity: a number’s Zeckendorf decomposition is the unique way it can be written as non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers, so (e.g.) 20 = 13 + 5 + 2. You can use the Zeckendorf decomposition to factorise numbers, although it turns out to be pretty slow.
A geeky aside
I found out this week that Paul Erdős appeared as himself in the documentary N is a Number, as did Tomas Luczak.
Luczak had a minor role in The Mill and the Cross, which also featured Charlotte Rampling.
Rampling and Martin Sheen both had acting credits for Jerusalemki sindrom.
And Martin Sheen was in JFK with Kevin Bacon.
Therefore Paul Erdős has a Bacon number of four — and also an Erdős-Bacon number of four. (Nicholas Metropolis, according to the Wiki, is also a 4.)
My Erdős number is 5+i; the i was bestowed upon me at G4G after I wore Erdős’s coat.
As it happens, today is Erdős’s 112th birthday. Here’s Katie celebrating it a few years ago.
Currently
There is a partial solar eclipse on Saturday coming (March 29th), visible across most of Europe and around the North Atlantic. Don’t look directly at the sun, unless of course you’re the President, in which case feel free to ignore that woke nanny-state nonsense.
Registration is open for the Zeeman Award ceremony on May 7th in London — you don’t get a Zeeman Award without being a legend; this year’s laureate is Brady Haran of Numberphile. (The dates are all over the place on that page, but I’m assured it’s this May.)
And I deliberately missed off Chris Smith’s maths newsletter from “here are good places to get maths content” last week — but only because I needed to check with him about how to sign up. You email aap03102@gmail.com and he’ll be delighted to have you on board.
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
Mathematician, author and friend of the site Rob Eastaway has received the 2016 Christopher Zeeman medal, awarded to recognise and acknowledge the contributions of mathematicians involved in promoting mathematics to the public and engaging with the public in mathematics in the UK.