Double Maths First Thing almost forgot to put this line in!
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of doing mathematical things.
This week I am mainly getting to grips with reluctantly becoming treasurer for my Toastmasters club. They’re letting me loose with the bank account? Good grief.
More creatively – oi, enough of that – I’m looking forward to a Pseudorandom Ensemble rehearsal this weekend, and spending some time finishing up the first draft of the fiction project that’s moving, slowly but inevitably, towards being completed.
Links
We’ll start this week with one of those “that doesn’t seem like an interesting topic for an article” articles that turns out, in point of fact, to be an interesting topic for an article after all. Here’s Robert Aboukhalil on the Burrows-Wheeler transform for helping lossless data compression.
In “this looks like a cool thing to play with” news, Victor Poughon has made a calculator that works on intervals rather than numbers.
Hot off the Aperiodical press, Katie Steckles has a set of books to recommend to maths students. I concur with the Vicky Neale recommendation especially; I reviewed it a few years ago.
In the Grauniad at the weekend, a nice piece about computing pioneer Tommy Flowers – although the idea that mathematicians are “too weird and abstracted to trust”.
Robin Houston pointed me at the Flummoxagon, a jigsaw puzzle with some good maths behind it. (The wider site is full of interesting art/puzzles/DMFT-friendly stuff.)
Currently
Tuesday coming, October 21st, is the traditional evening for MathsJam around the world and online. Your local custom may differ; check here for details, or instructions on how to start your own.
Tom Briggs and Jason Yip are trying a Thing: you can get involved with the History and Maths in Education Network here.
Keep getting involved in Mathober – today’s word is ‘chord’, which is clearly an excuse to write a mathematical song. (My favourite chord at the moment is G#dim. It’s like an E7, but without the E.)
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