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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

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 1

By Colin Beveridge. Posted September 11, 2024

Double Maths First Thing is Colin’s weekly news summary. Or autumnal, if you’re reading this after the equinox. You can sign up to receive it in your inbox on a Wednesday morning here.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician. It’s Wednesday morning, and it’s Double Maths First Thing.

Shape-ology

Over on the Talking Maths In Public WhatsApp group, we’ve been looking at collapsible polyhedra, which Barney Maunder-Taylor calls Flatonic Solids. He’s not the only one, though: here’s a satisfying Instagram reel and an article by Liz Meenan in case you want to make your own.

It also reminded me that you can do cool things with pop-ups, whether or not you have the book.

Speaking of books

Tom Briggs has been compiling suggestions of maths books that aren’t about teaching. I’m given to believe he might be making his own addition to the list in due course.

Peter Rowlett and his son have been reading Gulliver’s Travels, and found an interesting early description of something computery. A biased generator of randomness that produces plausible English? I bet the venture capitalists would be all over that.

Sudoku

I recently had cause to revisit the Miracle Sudoku video — memorably described at the time by Ben Orlin:

You’re about to spend the next 25 minutes watching a guy solve a sudoku.
Not only that, but it’s going to be the highlight of your day.

The highlight of my day recently was coming across Phistomephel’s ring, which is a neat consequence of standard sudoku rules.

Tony Mann pointed me at another Cracking the Cryptic video with the same energy — the frustrations and feelings of stupidity that come with not having the answer yet, followed by the sheer joy of having worked out something clever.

Another (and significantly shorter) video plausibly worth your time is Alyssa Williams and Christian Scott at G4G discussing how to set variant sudoku.

Joy in maths

Back to taking pleasure in maths, here’s a short interview with Talithia Williams, PhD: I loved the bit about maths appreciation, and trying to change the mindset that maths is about doing calculations to pass a test.

Another article that caught my eye this week was about climbing. Or rather, spotting an error on the climbing wall and getting it fixed. It’s interesting for several reasons, but what grabbed my attention was what I think of as x-ray vision: the power to see that something looks off, and the insistence that it be put right. That strikes me as a very mathematical thing. (And, speaking for myself, possibly an autistic thing. Drives me MAD when people don’t care about breaking the rules, I tell you.)

For your listening pleasure

This week, I have mostly been listening to:

• Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales
• Bec Hill and Matt Parker’s A Problem Squared
• Evelyn J Lamb and Kevin Knudson’s My Favorite Theorem
• Katie Steckles and Peter Rowlett’s Mathematical Objects — I understand that series 8 is imminent.

I’ve not yet picked up the TMiP podcast, but we all should. And Sam Hansen would give me endless, deserved grief if I didn’t mention Relatively Prime.

The week ahead

Thanks to September ending on a Monday, the monthly MathsJam meet-up is coming around distressingly quickly — those that meet on the traditional penultimate Tuesday will do so on September 17th. You can find your local MathsJam here — I’ll be at the Weymouth one.

Also, if you’re planning to go to Big MathsJam in November, early-bird pricing ends on Sunday.

There’s a Finite Group livestream on Friday, September 13th at 9pm BST — Katie and Ayliean are putting the ‘fun’ into ‘fundamental theorems’, it says 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

The Big Internet Math-Off 2024, Round 1, Match 1

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted July 1, 2024

It’s math-off time!

Here’s the first match in this year’s Big Internet Math-Off. Today, we’re pitting Katie Steckles against Benjamin Dickman.

Take a look at both pitches, vote for the bit of maths that made you do the loudest “Aha!”, and if you know any more cool facts about either of the topics presented here, please write a comment below!

Finite Group: update and free livestream

By Peter Rowlett. Posted March 7, 2024



A few months ago a group of us launched a membership club, The Finite Group, which you can join!

A big update is the lineup — your membership now supports the work of and gives you access to content from mathematician and TikTok star Ayliean MacDonald, as well as Chalkdust’s Matthew Scroggs and The Aperiodical’s Katie Steckles and me. Membership gives you access to a chat community and monthly livestreams. For a taste of the livestreams, check out this π minute video!

The big news is that the next livestream will be free to view live online on 27th March from 5-6pm GMT. All four of us will be working through the recent ‘100 Mathematical Conventions Questions’ quiz that’s been dividing (a small subset of) the internet. The stream will be available live, and a recording will be available to members afterwards.

New Book – Short Cuts: Maths

By Katie Steckles, Peter Rowlett and Sam Hartburn. Posted October 12, 2023



Our own Katie and Peter have collaborated on a new popular maths book, along with friends of the site Alison Kiddle and Sam Hartburn, which is out today. Short Cuts: Maths is an “expert guide to mastering the numbers behind the mysteries of modern mathematics,” and includes a range of topics from infinity and imaginary numbers to mathematical modelling, logic and abstract structures. We spoke to the four authors to see how they found it writing the book and what readers can expect.

How did this project come to be?

Peter: From my point of view, Katie approached me to ask if I’d like to be involved, which was very exciting! She’d worked on a couple of books with the same publisher and was asked to commission authors for this one. 

Katie: The publishers wanted to make this book – one of a ‘Short Cuts’ series which needed a maths title – and asked me to be commissioning editor, which meant I could write some of it and ask others to write the rest. I chose some people I’ve worked with before who I thought would have something interesting to say about some topics in maths (in particular, the topics I know less about, so they could help me with those bits!) 

Alison: As I was the last of the four of us to come on board, I think everyone had already expressed a preference for their favourite bits to write about, but luckily that left me with the two best topics, logic and probability.



Do any of you have previous experience of working on a project like this?

Alison: I’ve been involved in writing a book before but that one was about maths education, for an audience of mainly teachers, so this was a different sort of challenge, writing for a general audience with different levels of maths prior knowledge and enthusiasm. 

Sam: I’ve worked on many books in the same genre as a copyeditor and proofreader, but this was my first time as an author. I enjoyed seeing how the publishing process works from the author’s point of view – it’s definitely had an impact on my editorial work!

Peter: My first time in popular book form, though I felt it used a bunch of skills I’ve developed in other work. And Katie is so great at organising projects that it went really smoothly. 



What’s the book like?

Sam: It’s a book you can dip into – you don’t need to read it from front to back. Each page is self-contained and answers a question, and we tried to make the questions as interesting as possible (two of my particular favourites are ‘Is a mountain the same as a molehill?’ and ‘Do Nicholas Cage films cause drownings?’).

Alison: We had quite a strict word limit to write to, which was a bit hard to get used to at first as I have a tendency to use ten words when two will do – but this turned out to be a blessing because it focussed us all on what the really important concepts were, and we found ways to express those concepts in a concise manner.

Katie: I love how the style of the book builds in these gorgeous illustrations – we worked with the illustrator to make sure they fit with the text, but also bring out fun aspects of the ideas we’re talking about.

Who do you think would enjoy reading this book?

Sam: I’d like to think that anyone who has a vague interest in maths would get something out of it. Even though it delves into some deep mathematical topics, we’ve (hopefully!) written it in such a way that it’s understandable to anybody with school-level maths. But I’d hope that experienced mathematicians would also be able to find something new, or at least fun, in there.

Alison: I’m definitely going to be recommending it to the students I work with. The bite-size dipping in and out model is great for them to skim read so they can find out a little bit about the mathematical ideas that appeal to them. Particularly useful for people preparing for university interviews where they want to show off that they know some maths beyond the usual curriculum!

Katie: My mum’s definitely getting a copy for Christmas – and not just because I was involved in writing it: she’s not from a mathematical background but I think she’d enjoy the straightforward explanations and discovering new ideas.

What’s your favourite bit?

Sam: The publisher did commission some lovely illustrations. The bear in the modelling cycle is a particular delight!

Katie: Yes! We love the modelling bear. I also liked being able to share ideas people might not otherwise encounter if they read about mathematics, like how mathematical modelling works, or what topology is, or some of the nitty-gritty of mathematical logic.



Peter: There are loads of quick summaries of areas of maths I know less about, which is really nice to have. The illustrations are great — the baby failing to manage a crocodile always makes me chuckle, and I can’t wait to show my son the game theory dinosaurs!

Short Cuts: Maths is available to buy today from all good bookshops.

Announcing The Finite Group

By Peter Rowlett. Posted September 26, 2023

“Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place where maths people could hang out and create cool maths things?” This idea was put to me a couple of years ago, and has stuck with me. It does sound nice.

Fast forward to 2023, and social media is collapsing. Some people have chosen a direction and are marching off towards Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, or a number of other platforms. Some people are trying to keep up with multiple of these, but feeling spread too thin and wondering if it’s worth the effort (ask me how I know!). But many people are taking the opportunity to step back and think again. People are rethinking whether they want to conduct their online social lives in public. There is a surge in private communities, things like WhatsApp groups, Slack channels and Discord rooms. These have the advantage that you aren’t part of the ‘engagement’-driven content push, but they have disadvantages too – you have to know the right people to get into the group.

Meanwhile, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place where maths people could hang out and create cool maths things?

So we’re creating it. We’re calling it The Finite Group (who doesn’t love a punny maths name?). “We” is Katie Steckles, Sophie Maclean, Matthew Scroggs and me. It’s going to be a maths community that gets together to share and create cool maths things, that supports creators to do their work within the group and on the wider internet.



MathsCity Leeds starting adults-only evening events

By Katie Steckles. Posted September 25, 2023



The hands-on maths discovery centre MathsCity in Leeds is branching out into adults-only evening events! This is in addition to their current programme of drop-in activities and family events, which already includes plenty of half-term and summer holiday activities for kids and families.