# You're reading: Posts Tagged: MathsJam

### MathsJam Leuven recap, February 2022

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a MathsJam recap, but having restarted the MathsJam in Leuven after a hiatus, Dieter was too excited not to share what they’d been up to.

The first (re)edition of the Maths Jam in Leuven (Historic university city in Belgium) was a tiny success. I brought a couple of physical copies of the single page worksheet called the MathsJam Meta Shout with $\sim$10 problems from different sub areas of maths which I received earlier from Katie who coordinates MathsJams internationally.

The problems on the sheet were ranging from simple (?) Fold-and-cut fun, Tangrams (geometry), to some number theory, a touch of Linear Algebra and an easy arithmetic problem, solvable with 12-yo-level calculations (i.e. arrange all numbers from 1-15 so that each adjacent numbers sum to a square of a whole number under 16). Nice to see how broad the difficulty space is on the worksheet. Creative problem solving for (nearly) all ages!

On the second to last Tuesday of February 2022 (and hopefully each month from now), we were 3 in total. Which is a good number, I guess, for the Leuven revival anno 2022. Plenty of room to go from there – and a prime number, naturally! :-) Unfortunately we got kicked out of the venue at 21h30 (we started at 20h GMT+1) because we were the only ones left and the venue closes at 22h on Tuesdays (something I didn’t check, nor expected really). But puzzle minded we were, we just overflowed to someone’s home -after a rainy bike intermezzo which refreshened our minds. This didn’t stop us continuing our puzzling until 23h.

One of the attendees (a mathematician by degree) aced all the problems in <3h all the while (attempting) to explain his rationale. It was quite impressive to see! And fun too, because I definitely learned quite some things that night. I was still attempting to fold-and-cut the necessary T-shape with the proper dimensions (3 unit squares on top & 4 from top to bottom) when others had already finished their second tangrams (with some clever area proportion estimates). I forgot to bring my edition of the Set game so we didn’t participate in the online inter-MathsJam set-hunt – being only three we were too eager to just dive into the puzzles first.

After that second to last Tuesday, I tried some of the puzzles I hadn’t completed that night myself and I still haven’t finished them all just yet. (Some of them really make the gears in my brain grind!) I really liked the mix of complexity and variation in type of problems (kudos/thx/merci to all those involved in the making of the Shout).

I’m already eagerly looking forward to the next edition Shout and the next physical meetup by extension (Tuesday 22th of March), and have arranged a new venue for this month in the bar Café Entrepot of the local art center Opek. This seems very fitting for the subtle art of maths and I’ve got the guarantee that they will host us at length, yay! I sure hope to see you there on a second to last Tuesday soon. :-)

### MathsJam’s “Back of an Envelope” Fermi Challenge

Aperiodipal and MathsJam regular Rob Eastaway organised an inter-MathsJam competition for last month’s events, challenging Jams to make Fermi estimates on the back of an envelope. The prize was a copy of his new book, Maths on the Back of an Envelope. Here Rob gives a summary of the entries he received, and shares his favourites.

Regular attendees of MathsJam will know that in September, Katie Steckles kindly allowed me to hijack the evening (in the nicest possible sense) by posing some envelope-related challenges, in celebration of the publication of my new book Maths On The Back Of An Envelope. In addition to some envelope-related puzzles, there was also an open challenge to Maths Jam groups to come up with their own back-of-an-envelope problems, with the chance to win the book as a prize.

### Many-to-many Shape Sorter

Did you like playing with shape sorters as a toddler, but find them too simple as an adult? Well, I’ve got good news for you.

### The Maths Podcast to end all Maths Podcasts

At the MathsJam weekend gathering earlier this month, we found ourselves invited to join maths podcasting supremo Samuel Hansen for a recording session. Nothing unusual there: podcasts have been recorded at MathsJam before. But this time Samuel wanted to record more than one podcast at the same time – since many of the maths podcasting community were present, it seemed like a good plan to grab anyone who wasn’t already doing something else and record something quite unlike any podcast you’ve ever heard.

### Big MathsJam Highlights, 2018

The dust is settling on the ninth Big MathsJam, and before I get too sad that it’s nearly a year until the next one, I put down some thoughts about what was so good about this one.

### Zeckendorf cup arithmetic

My 5-minute talk at the big MathsJam conference this weekend was about some stacking cups that my daughter is too young to appreciate. Here’s the really quick version, in just over a minute:

I gave the answer at MathsJam, but the title of this post contains a big hint that should get you there with a bit of googling.

### Baking Babylonian cuneiform tablets in gingerbread

The MathsJam conference has a baking competition. My friend the archaeologist Stephen O’Brien tweeted a while ago a link to a fun blog post ‘Edible Archaeology: Gingerbread Cuneiform Tablets‘. Babylonian tablets are among the earliest written evidence of mathematics that we have, and were produced by pressing a stylus into wet clay.

So it was that I realised I could enter some Babylonian-style tablets made from gingerbread.

I made a gingerbread reconstruction of a particular tablet, YBC 7289, which Bill Casselman calls “one of the very oldest mathematical diagrams extant“. Bill writes about the notation on the tablet and explains how it shows an approximation for the square root of two. I’m sure I didn’t copy the notation well, because I am just copying marks rather than understanding what I’m writing. I also tried to copy the lines and damage to the tablet. Anyway, here is my effort:

In addition, I used the rest of the dough to make some cuneiform biscuits. I tried to copy characters from Plimpton 322, a Babylonian tablet thought to contain a list of Pythagorean triples. Again, Bill Casselman has some interesting information on Plimpton 322.

Below, I try to give a description of my method.