Double Maths First Thing picked the wrong week to give up Lemsip
Hello! My name is Colin and I am mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of doing, thinking about, playing with and suffering from mathematics. I am not on a mission to suffer from a cold the week I’m meant to be recording an album, but here we are.
I’m also emerging from a cloud of too much work, which is likely related to the lurgy. Hopefully I can put some more time into doing maths I enjoy over the next few weeks. Big MathsJam is but weeks away; I’ve sketched out my talk and I’m looking forward to tormenting people about the zeroth row of Pascal’s triangle.
Links
Now, I’ve had a huge uptick in developers emailing me links and vouchers for daily puzzle games and I don’t have the time or energy to figure out which ones are worth looking at. Daily games might still feature here, but cold emails are not the way to promote them to me. The way to get my attention is to get someone I trust to mention them in the group chat, like Primaries did. That’s a very frustrating game. Same goes for ObsQRity.
The Pudding has done the network analysis and determined that Kevin Bacon is not the centre of the (Hollywood) universe. No word on Erdős.
In “friends of DMFT” news, I would like to draw your attention to Katie Steckles Curious Cases AND SEPARATELY the BBC front page (the latter with scripting help from Tom Briggs). Darren Macey and Lucy Rycroft-Smith at the RSS have a report on how to assess statistics in schools. And Jonny Griffiths has a free fiction book with tessellation themes.
One of my favourite newsletters is Soph Warnes’s Fair Warning; this week’s issue pointed me at two good maps: a gazetteer of American literature (which somehow doesn’t include Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance in Bozeman, Montana) and an animation of Amsterdam publishers mentioned in popular songs. (Of course, if you’re interested in my songs and ramblings about them, you can always sign up to my folksinger newsletter.)
If you’ve been to MathsWorld and thought “I wish I could get a job here!”, you might consider applying to be an Enabler.
Currently
Kit Yates is talking at the Stratford Literary Festival on November 1st, 2-3pm UK time.
Light Night Leeds is maths-themed this year, tonight and tomorrow (28th and 29th October) from 6:30pm.
Sam Hartburn is hosting this month’s Carnival of Mathematics and (I imagine) would love to see any links you post. She’s also running the TMiP Animation Collaboration, and you’d do well to get your FRACTALS animations to her by the end of the month.
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