Double Maths First Thing has an army of clones
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of working things out. I had a delightful chat with young Bill about complex numbers and matrices and noticed that the difference between him and most of my students is that he wants to know how things work and how they fit together and why, while most young mathematicians I meet are interested in learning rules that get the Right Answer.
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There’s a solar eclipse happening today! Over the UK, it’s only partial (coverage from around 6pm-8pm our time); you can check details where you are here. Don’t look directly at it, that will frighten it. Colanders make very good shadow-creators. Here is a worksheet about the trigonometry of eclipses, a neat “when will we ever use that in real life?” answer; I found this Desmos activity a bit more engaging.
Staying in space, I understand that the world’s richest person isn’t content with crashing cars into pedestrians, lakes, etc., and has crashed a landing stage into the moon. The ESO, realising it was going to happen, thought “I know! Let’s do some science!. Also astronomical: I’ve been enjoying The Message From Deep Space, which several people recommended to me – so far, it’s about decoding the way an alien meteorite does maths.
Fractal Kitty is a busy kitten currently; she’s working on a series of posts about maths art prompts and has developed something fun about the maths of hanging chains that I’m looking forward to playing with. More detail on that here.
Musical legend Tom Lehrer did many remarkable things; one of these was to release as much music as he possibly could into the public domain. Eric Ries has compiled a songbook thereof.
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The Pseudorandom Ensemble considered playing a Tom Lehrer song in tribute, but then thought “why should we? He never did any of ours.” You can now buy tickets for our show at MathsWorld on September 21st.
We’re not the only great MathsWorld events coming up: June Barrow-Green is speaking about the historical representation of women in maths tonight at 6:15pm UK time, and I’m gutted to be missing Samira Mian‘s InHERited lines exhibition which is at MathsWorld until the end of August. There’s a Meet The Artist with her tomorrow (Thursday August 13th) from 10am UK time.
There’s a Finite Group livestream tomorrow, Thursday August 13th at 6pm UK time.
Next week is the traditional MathsJam Tuesday around the world. Go along, or find out how to 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