Double Maths First Thing had to look up where Wells is
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight in the beauty of maths, and the human effort of figuring things out.
This week I’ve been taking joy in simplifying and clarifying code that wasn’t quite right last time it was deployed. With a bit of space and distance, I was able to see a neater way of dealing with the edge cases and – even better – a neater way of explaining what was going on.
Meanwhile, everyone has been begging, begging me to share videos of the Pseudorandom Ensemble’s triumphant show at MathsWorld. Sam Hartburn has been diligently putting clips together.
Correspondence from .mau., who reports that the Italian for puzzle is rompicapo – like in French, “breaking the head”. I suppose “brainteaser”, “mind-bender” and “head-scratcher” are the closest English equivalents.
Links
Margaret Hamilton has died, aged 90. It genuinely hadn’t occurred to me that she might still be alive. There are some people who are science heroes, and some who accomplished jaw-dropping feats; Hamilton is in the latter camp for me. She – her code – landed those blokes on the moon, automatically putting things right after something went wrong, using less computing power than is in my car key. I believe it was her code that Lorenz interrupted on the way to coming across chaos theory. She invented the term ‘software engineering’. I applaud her memory.
Ele Willoughby, PhD is an excellent person to follow in the fediverse; I’m forever learning about an obscure-to-me scientist and gawping at her gorgeous linocuts. This week, my attention was grabbed by Mary Golda Ross.
Important knitting news: mathematicians have invented a stitch that stops mistakes from spreading. Unfortunately it appears only to work in knitting; it would be super-useful to have in science generally.
A quick game of good map, bad map. (Every time I look at the bad map, I blink several times and walk slowly away).
And finally, here’s Richard Elwes talking about polyhedra.
Currently
Richard Elwes, you say? The man is everywhere. In particular, he’s in… Somerset? Talking big numbers at the Wells Literary Festival this Sunday October 18th at 4:15pm. Tickets are £12.50.
Brigitte Stenhouse is talking about Mary Somerville. Apparently that’s just a fair bet at any given moment in time, but she’ll be doing it specifically at the LSE in London this evening, Wednesday October 14th at 6:30pm. Tickets are free.
Next week is MathsJam week around the world, typically on Tuesday October 20th. Sadly, Weymouth is on hiatus for the foreseeable future; maybe I’ll get to visit some others instead.
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