Double Maths First Thing is petitioning the weather to be nicer
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in all things mathematical. I had a nice “oho!” moment in class with a student today looking at a question from a Madas paper – it’s subtly different to an “aha!” moment, there’s an element of “I know exactly what you did there and I admire the audacity.”
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Talking of exam papers, it feels like futile petitions to the exam board season gets earlier each year. Students have been trying this on – complaining that the paper was a bit hard – since at least 2013 and I honestly have to say “that’s sort of the point of an exam”. I’m not an expert in the Scottish Highers, but I looked through the papers and they looked perfectly reasonable to me (I’ve also looked at expert-on-the-ground Chris Smith’s analysis; I wouldn’t presume to speak for him, but I think it’s safe to say my assessment is similar to his. But I didn’t copy, ok?). For the benefit of any students who happen to read this: there are occasional, fairly rare cases where an exam board makes an egregious error in a paper. These are always picked up quickly and there are processes in place for making sure nobody is disadvantaged. Signing petitions like this is as pathetic as harassing sports referees or using ChatGPT to write an AITA post on reddit. You’d be much better advised emailing Chris ( aap03102 @ gmail . com ) and asking to be on his newsletter list – I imagine there’ll be a detailed breakdown of the papers before long.
An amazing thread on Mathstodon about some of Wolfram|Alpha’s historical hiccups. I think Christian Lawson-Perfect used to run a Twitter bot called Wolfram Alpha Can’t, but I imagine that didn’t make the great exodus.
Here’s Richard Elwes talking about the Rubik’s cube on Numberphile.
In the Mathematical Gazette, there’s an article by Douglas Hofstadter about the role of intuition in maths – I know (journal editor) Peter Rowlett would welcome responses on the topic: gazette @ amie . org . uk . (I keep mistyping it as the Mathematical Gazelle, which is interesting in its own way.)
I’ve not done a games roundup for a while, and a few have recently crossed my path. Here’s Minesweeper, but with a Rock-Paper-Scissors theme; Fractal Kitty has a Truchet tiling puzzle (I LOVE Truchet tiles) and in Lacuno, you play something like a sudoku with shapes. (I found a way to think about it that made it annoyingly straightforward; you might be more lucky.) There’s also the option of practicing your LaTeX skills, which is as appealing to me as sitting in a basement office for three months of the summer and producing a thesis.
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Speaking of Fractal Kitty, Sophia is in charge of the upcoming Carnival; you’ve still got a couple of weeks to submit links to it in the usual place. You can also email me if you fancy having a go at hosting one.
Speaking of games, there’s a Finite Group livestream tomorrow about Wordle, with Scroggs and Ayliean; that’s Thursday May 14th at 8pm UK time.
There’s a special issue of The Mathematics Enthusiast on “Liberal Arts Mathematics”; the deadline in their call for papers is June 1st.
It’s also MathsJam week: get your geek on in any of dozens of settlements around the world, or start your own!
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