Double Maths First Thing thinks ISO8601’s great
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy — I almost misspelt “mathematical” as “mayhem”, so let’s have a bit of that, too.
I spent much of the weekend with a secret cabal of mathematical musicians at an undisclosed location. I’m not authorised to say whether we were rehearsing original maths songs and I certainly couldn’t comment on rumours of a future gig on the roof of the RI. By which I mean, you’ll likely hear more details in the future.
Links
What’s been on my radar this week? Well, r/math has been surprisingly interesting, with a dissection of a square into 32 similar triangles and a nice pandigital approximation for e.
It was pointed out to me that I didn’t say what I was trying to solve blindfold last week. To clarify, I’ve been learning the M2 method for solving the Rubik’s Cube. If you were a computer, you might prefer a more brute force method.
When I was about 8, I got into trouble at school for saying “DAMN!” when my Polydron dodecahedron collapsed. If you want to have the same experience of frustration, you can get a 10% discount over the next few months. (That’s not an affiliate link, we don’t roll that way around here.)
A way we do roll is to stand up and say “oi! no!” to bullies. I’m conscious that I have pretty close to a full bingo card of privilege, and that a lot of the toxic behaviour in academia flies beyond my radar. Dr Rachel Los’s Anti-Acknowledgements (p113), (or more conveniently, in a toot) in her thesis (brilliantly titled “Play Nice or Pay the Price”) make me sigh in despair; men need to stop behaving like this, and the “not all men” men need to call out this sort of behaviour.
Currently
Less upsettingly, there’s a lot going on at the moment! This week has Pi Day, about which I am largely curmudgeonly, but some people erroneously believe it’s more Geek Christmas than Big MathsJam is. Whatever, you do you!
Tuesday coming (March 18th, 2025) is the traditional time for your local MathsJam — find your nearest one here, along with instructions on how to start your own if the nearest one is inconvenient. There’s also an online (UK) one if that’s better for you.
And on Monday coming (March 17th), there’s a Finite Group livestream. The FG Discord is a great hangout for mathematicians, and I always enjoy watching the livestreams with my 11yo.
Last week, I neglected to mention that TMiP is organising an Animation Generation Collaboration — a challenge to see what people come up with, and to share techniques.
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