There is a good service on all DMFT lines
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to share the joy, love and creativity of doing exactly the right maths for you.
This week, I have mainly been cursing the name of Scroggs and his cursed Chalkdust crossnumber. (It’s traditional, when someone mentions Chalkdust magazine, for you to say “what’s that?” and the response to be “it’s a magazine for the mathematically curious”.)
Links
If you’re anything like me, you will find the following pair of links to be personal catnip: three-dimensional maps of stations in Europe and the Americas, as well as specifically on the London Underground. I’ve certainly been more lost in Elephant & Castle than the map makes it look possible to be.
I’m shocked – shocked – to discover that there is fraud going on in scientific publishing and some academics are gaming the system, a fine example of Cunningham’s law. (Tee hee). The paper outlines some approaches to limit this, and reminds me of some reasons I don’t play academia any more.
The kids, when they do what I always called ‘carries’ and ‘borrows’ in arithmetic, use the word ‘exchanges’, which is a much more reasonable word. I also liked this explanation of ‘fat numbers’, which make the exchanges explicit.
In ‘slightly evil’ news from 2011 (the site is currently down, hence the Web Archive link), Simon Inns built a Vetinari Clock that ticks irregularly. As well as leaving visitors feeling ill at ease, clocks can be used to explain the basics of cryptography.
And lastly, certainly winning the prize for “most provocative title”, a 2000 paper by Adler and Tanton demonstrates that π is the minimum value for pi.
Currently
Yesterday was the antepenultimate Tuesday of the month, which means Little MathsJam is almost upon us. In most of the world, that’ll be on Tuesday September 23rd, but check the website for your local details.
Also coming up is the rescheduled Finite Group livestream for September, featuring scicomm legend Hana Ayoob. That’s on Thursday September 25th for paying subscribers; free tier members do get access to an often entertaining Discord.
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