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Double Maths First Thing: Issue 2

By Colin Beveridge. Posted September 18, 2024

Double Maths First Thing is Colin’s weekly newsletter. Usually several letters, arranged into words.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight through the medium of mathematics. It’s Wednesday morning and it’s time for Double Maths First Thing.

Number City!

There’s only one place to start this week: on an Orcadian all-weather hockey pitch, where Katie Steckles is at it again. A crack team of maths communicators built towers of boxes representing the prime factors of the numbers up to 64. I love this sort of large-scale outreach project — low barrier to entry (anyone can doodle a number on a box), high curiosity factor (“what are all those nerds doing on the hockey pitch? Is that… Matt Parker? With SEVEN FROM NUMBERBLOCKS?!“), and plenty of depth available for those who seek it.

Meanwhile, Andrew Taylor created a game off of it, because when you’re Andrew Taylor, there are more important things than sleep. You’re given a picture of a small section of Number City and need to deduce where you are.

The only thing I don’t like is that it’s clearly not Number City — it’s a Factory Town.

A Number-Picking Puzzle

I secretly write down a number between 1 and 100 and you have to guess it. You pay me £1 every time you make a guess (I’ll tell you “higher”, “lower” or correct) and I’ll pay you £6 once you get the right answer.

How should you play if you know I’ve picked at random? How should you play if we’re both playing to win? Who wins in the long run?

The reason I ask is, Steve Ballmer (one-time CEO of Microsoft) used to ask this as a coding interview question; his answer was controversial.

There’s some analysis from John Graham-Cumming and from Possibly Wrong — I haven’t gone through it myself, because I’m still trying to figure out the answer when it’s a number from 1 to 3.

Classical maths

I’ve included the next three links as a challenge. Don’t get me wrong, I think they’re good, solid mathematical blog posts, made available for free, so I’m not going to complain — and yet I have a nagging feeling they could be done better. Could you explain these things more clearly?

Eli Bendersky has some notes on the Euler formula (I shall redact my rant about how the very idea of “the most beautiful equation” is offensive and wrong and replace it with one grumbling about Eli not properly LaTeXing up his functions).

John D Cook, meanwhile, has some advice on mentally approximating logs and trig functions.

And finally, Adrian Biagioli has an explanation of Perlin noise.

Not enough maths in your life?

I mean, who has? In case you’re one of today’s lucky 10,000 who don’t know about Chris Smith, he’s been running a school maths department newsletter for… well, I subscribed a decade ago and it’s gone from issue 293 to 690 in the meantime, so I imagine you can work it out. If you want to be part of the fun — a seemingly endless supply of jokes, puzzles and news, not to mention a milk rota that I’m too far in to ask about now — you can sign up by sending him an email.

In the meantime, 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.

That’s all for this week! If there’s something I should know about, you can find me on Mathstodon as @icecolbeveridge, or at my personal website.

Until next time,

C

Campaign to disregard Turing’s conviction

By Peter Rowlett. Posted June 3, 2012

A report on the MK [Milton Keynes] NEWS website offers support for the campaign of Iain Stewart MP “in his efforts to have Alan Turing’s conviction for homosexuality quashed”.

In a piece for Travels in a Mathematical World I wrote about the Turing pardon and the prospect of a new piece of legislation which, according to John Graham-Cumming, “specifically allows for the disregarding of convictions under the old law that was used against Turing”.  The new development in the MK News piece refers to this legislation:

The recently-passed Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 allows a person who has been convicted or received a caution for an offence under sections 12 or 13 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956 to apply to have this ‘disregarded’.
These are the same offences for which Turing was convicted and Mr Stewart wants this disregard to be applied posthumously.

So the focus seems to have moved from a pardon, which the Government refused to do, to having the conviction posthumously disregarded under chapter four of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 (which, if I’m reading it correctly, seems to allow for the person convicted to apply themselves to have their conviction disregarded).

Source: Add your voice to clear a war hero.

Today only: The Geek Atlas ebook half price

By Peter Rowlett. Posted May 4, 2012



I don’t really intend this to be an advert but for a while now I’ve half intended to pick up a copy of John Graham-Cumming’s The Geek Atlas. I just bought a DRM-free ebook half price as part of an International Day Against DRM promotion.

Protection of Freedoms Act 2012

By Peter Rowlett. Posted May 4, 2012

One of the reasons given against a pardon for Alan Turing in a November 2011 blog post by John Graham-Cumming (who successfully campaigned for a Turing apology in 2009) was that the Protection of Freedoms bill, if passed, would make a pardon unnecessary. This is because this

specifically allows for the disregarding of convictions under the old law that was used against Turing. Once disregarded the law causes their convictions to be deleted. It’s not quite the same thing as a pardon, but its effect is to lift the burden of a criminal record from these living men.

Now the bill has gained Royal Assent, becoming the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012. A short piece in The Independent calls this “a freedom too late” for Alan Turing. The Turing pardon e-petition now has over 33,000 signatures.

Source: Protection of Freedoms Bill.

No pardon for Turing

By Peter Rowlett. Posted February 6, 2012

A government minister in the Ministry of Justice, Lord McNally, in response to a question from Lord Sharkey on Thursday 2nd February 2012 made a statement in the House or Lords that “a posthumous pardon [for Alan Turing] was not considered appropriate”.

The statement acknowledges that the offence of which Turing was convicted “now seems both cruel and absurd” but says that Turing “would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted”. This says that the:

long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.

Back when the pardon petition was launched in November 2011, John Graham-Cumming, the man responsible for the Turing apology petition in 2009, wrote a blog post explaining why he did not support the pardon petition: Why I’m not supporting the campaign for a pardon for Alan Turing (26 November 2011).

On the Math/Maths Podcast this week Samuel Hansen spoke convincingly about a pardon, above an apology, as having the effect of removing the conviction, not merely apologising for it. Graham-Cumming points to the Protection of Freedoms bill, currently passing through the House of Lords, which:

specifically allows for the disregarding of convictions under the old law that was used against Turing. Once disregarded the law causes their convictions to be deleted. It’s not quite the same thing as a pardon, but its effect is to lift the burden of a criminal record from these living men [those who are “still hurt by that law”].