Double Maths First Thing is beautiful, it’s simple and it’s wrong
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to share the joy and love that comes from doing maths. As the amazing Jo Sibley says, if you love someone, set them a tricky maths problem.
I had probably the greatest experience of my songwriting life at the weekend, in the Pseudorandom Ensemble rehearsal room as the band took my scratchy, off-key demo of a new song and turned it into a Motown-inspired banger. There’s something about experts with different but complementary skills working together that’s far more powerful than any of us could accomplish alone.
In last week’s issue, I misspelt “flummoxagon“; thanks to Christian for finding and correcting the version here; even Christian can’t edit emails after they’re sent, though. Apologies.
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While I think it’s nice to be a technically good mathematician, I think it’s also important to me to be a morally good mathematician. In that vein, I was impressed by Benjamin Kuipers’ explanation of why he doesn’t accept military funding. I especially like that he acknowledges that that limits what he’s able to do, and that he presents it as an option rather than a recommendation.
Moral goodness is best when paired with a sense of indignation and a determination to combat evil. In this vein, Pixelmelt reverse-engineers Amazon’s ebook obfuscation system.
Obsessiveness doesn’t need to be about combatting evil. Before I link to the next article, I want to share a quote from it: “To me, this amount of work to get the World Record run is just barely too much to be worthwhile.” Them – I think it would be remiss not to point out – is fighting words. A blogger known only as “Graham” has identified a strategy for a game called Unfair Flips that relies on observing the number of frames a goblin takes to drink its milk to determine the current random seed, and using that to determine the best time to attempt to flip ten heads in a row.
As well as morally good, I think it’s vital to be comically good. This paper contains my new favourite diagram, a directed acyclic word graph, or “dawg”. The choice of lexicon to illustrate it is perfect. I believe the lead author (Andrew Appel) is the son of Kenneth Appel, famed for his work in proving the four-colour theorem. In the computational graph theory world, the Appel doesn’t fall far from the trie.
You’ve heard of IMDb. How about MMBb, a catalogue of movies with maths in, rated from * to ***** according to the amount of mathematical content? It’s not been updated in five years, so if you know of more recent maths movies, let them know!
In “questions you didn’t know you had”, we know how many non-negative integers there are, it’s ω. But what if you arrange them in alphabetical order? (It’s always bothered me that that list has a first element – eight – and a last element – zero – but the middle goes on forever.)
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Big news from that London: MathsWorld has opened its doors! (It’s very close to the Tate Modern, about 10 minutes’ walk from Waterloo station, and we’re already looking forward to visiting.)
At the TMiP conference earlier this year, Matt announced that the winning project for the MEGA grant was Christian Lawson-Perfect’s idea of covering a beach in spectres. Follow the links if you’d like to be involved!
Mathober continues. Continue mathobering.
The first meeting of the Chalkdust book club is Tuesday coming, October 28th, 6:30pm online. The book for discussion is Is Maths Real? by Eugenia Cheng.
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