If you’ve got a mathematical friend you need to buy a Christmas gift for but have left it too late, here’s some suggestions for what you could get them, drawn from things our friends are doing (that don’t need you to wait for something to arrive in the post).
Since it’s the time of year when you might be looking for mathematical gifts to buy for your friends, colleagues and loves ones, I thought I’d share some recommendations and suggestions for places to find gifts online.
Our good friends at Maths Gear have sent us a tube of “unique polyhedral dice” to review. The description on mathsgear.co.uk says they’re “made from polyhedra you don’t normally see in the dice world”. My first thought was that we should test they’re fair by getting David to throw them a few thousand times but — while David was up for it — I’d have to keep score, which didn’t sound fun.
So instead we thought of some criteria we can judge the dice on, and sat down with a teeny tiny video camera. Here’s our review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prFc3Vv0lXs
If you like your shapes to be of constant width, friends of the Aperiodical Matt Parker and Steve Mould, who run Maths Gear, have long been the market leader in selling you flat 2D shapes which have the same diameter no matter which direction you measure in (well, them and the Royal Mint). But if you prefer your shapes to be of constant width in three dimensions, you can now satisfy those urges too at MathsGear.co.uk.
They’ve just launched a new product, which is a handsome set of yellow solids of constant width (for those interested, they’re not the standard Reuleaux triangle-based solid of revolution commonly sold – they’re Meissner Tetrahedra). A set of three, which allows you to test the constant width property by rolling them between a table and a book, is yours for £15, with free delivery in the UK. Tables and books sold separately.
Buy: Maths Gear website.