Double Maths First Thing is checking its email far too often
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy and delight.
We had a family trip to the Science Museum in London at the weekend. I’ve written previously about the Winton Mathematics Gallery and I stand by it — young Bill was disappointed that there “wasn’t very much maths there”, which is about as damning an indictment as an 11-year-old can give. I get his point; the gallery is all about applying maths in other fields, and very little about doing maths as something worth doing for its own sake. I point you at Christian Lawson-Perfect’s Interesting Esoterica section on the act of doing maths as an antidote.
Links!
I have a new favourite paper, although I can’t reliably access it (it’s served over http and my browser says NO! HTTPS ONLY!). You may have better luck: it’s Tom Murphy VII’s extension of the Elo system to account for hilariously bad chess bots.
A couple of links about how computers store numbers: I enjoyed this curiosity about a fun piece of bit-hacking, and this even-less-practical article about an alternative way of encoding numbers with iterated logarithms. Practical, schmactical: part of the joy of maths is trying something unusual and seeing what shakes out.
Someone who took great delight in maths was Mary Everest Boole, as Lucy Rycroft-Smith explores here.
A nice article I’ve only skimmed looks at implementing a method for producing Voronoi diagrams. Despite spending a good deal of my PhD tearing my hair out over convex hulls and Delaunay triangulations, I still have a soft spot for Voronoi.
And since we’re being a bit silly, how about the search for London’s most central sheep?
Last one today: the Wikipedia article on the Taegukgi, the national flag of South Korea has a section suggesting how to construct it, just in case you wanted a Geogebra challenge.
Links
I spent a lot of Tuesday recovering from a vicious nerdsnipe, “courtesy” of
Matt Parker on Numberphile. I thought I had something based on Gaussian integers, but alas, I had blundered. Hardly surprising; smarter people than me have been hunting for a while, and if there was something simple they’d have found it by now. Again, though, the joy is in doing the maths.
Tuesday coming is MathsJam day — you should definitely join your local selection of geeks in the pub and/or organise a pub for your local selection of geeks to meet in, should there not be one already. I gather this month’s theme is pasta, although I suspect it’ll be disappointingly short of mathematical rigour-toni.
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