Double Maths First Thing couldn’t possibly comment.
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in engaging with maths, for any reason or for none. I’ve made it back from rehearsal and am feeling a lot better (thanks for asking).
(By the way, if you know of any Colin-shaped work, please let me know about it — I’d love something stable, remote, part-time and reasonably paid but neither soul-crushing nor burnout-inducing. Plus the moon on a stick, obviously. I can write. I can code. I can solve weird problems. There must be something, right?)
Links
Let’s start with something on my to-read list: Tai-Danae Bradley’s guide to category theory and notes on Applied category theory. I feel like there’s something going on a level up from where I normally look at things and that category theory might be a lens to examine it through.
A nice series of posts by Ioanna Georgiou and Asuka Young on mathematical themes implicit in the situation-comedy Friends, which I gather many cooler people than me are into.
We all know and love the rhombic dodecahedron, but Robin Houston is at pains to point out that it’s not the RD, but a RD..
David Eppstein has been to Kanazawa, Japan and found plenty of geometrical street art. Meanwhile, John Carlos Baez is in Athens, where the maths department is full of graffiti.
And following on from Minesweeper in issue 2B, we’ve now got Mark Round’s Primesweeper. Which is not in the slightest bit stressful.
Currently
I enjoyed the Finite Group livestream last week, especially the bit about bees’ ancestry following a Fibonacci sequence. You can join and, for a very reasonable monthly outlay, have access to some of the previous livestreams and all of the new ones. (You can even join for free and hang out in the Discord with awesome maths people.)
One small appeal from me: it’s striking, looking back through past DMFTs how heavily the links skew towards male (or male-presenting) mathematicians. I’m keen to amplify the voices of women and other members of under-represented groups. if you stumble on a link spoken in such a voice and think “I’m not sure Colin would be interested” or “I don’t want to bother him” — I’ll tell you right now, it’s no bother and I’m certainly interested.
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