Double Maths First Thing is trying to be good.
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of doing maths. I had an “oo! oo! oo!” moment at MathsJam last week, figuring out a neat solution to a question that I’d not had time to work out in class.
Meanwhile, I’m just about recovered from the half-term break and getting my teeth back into some client work wrangling weather data and some still-secret exciting projects that make me grin when I think of them.
Links
The theme for today is good and evil. It means a lot to me to be a good mathematician, someone who tries to use my powers to make the world a better place. It was a bit of a shock, then, to be told that “disgraced financier” – or, as humans call him, “corrupt sex trafficker” Jeffrey Epstein intended to attend a G4G Gathering.
Despite having no pretensions to being a journalist (don’t well technically me, thank you), I reached out to Gathering 4 Gardner for a comment. They clarify that while Epstein was invited by another attendee and was on the mailing list, his apparent intention didn’t stretch as far as registering for or attending a Gathering. They also gave the short statement:
“The harm that Epstein inflicted on women and young children was horrific. We remain committed to the Gathering 4 Gardner foundation’s mission of stimulating curiosity and the playful exchange of ideas and critical thinking in recreational math, magic, science, literature, and puzzles to preserve and extend the legacy of writer and polymath Martin Gardner.”
I agree with all of that, and believe G4G is a force for good in the world, and I acknowledge we don’t always have control over who associates with us. All the same, it’s a bit close for comfort – or, as humans say, “YIKES”.
The thing is, it’s fairly easy to fall into doing maths that is… ethically suboptimal. I’ve worked in finance and for an AUV firm with links to the military. I’ve tutored the children of extremely wealthy people. Who knows what my limited scientific progress could lead to, for good or evil? Caleb Thompson talks about this more eloquently than I could. Evil on a different axis: kittyboy and vmfunc have figured out how to cheat at rhythm games.
BUT – maths can, and should, be a force for good. Here’s Miles Wu origami-ing up strong shelters for use in disaster zones. Here’s Margaret Calvert revolutionising road sign design, even if that’s only tangentially mathematical. Here’s a markup language designed specifically for recipes (which reminds me of the time an online recipe scaler called for seventeen-sixths of a pinch of salt.) And, cycling back, Mahmoud al-Qudsi throws everything he has at unredacting PDFs in the Epstein files.
Maths should also be a force for whimsy. Here’s Ayliean playing Wordle Tetris. You can follow Scroggs’s bot on bluesky. Of course there’s a Scroggsbot.
The links are all over the place today. Let’s talk about why airlines don’t “just board from the back”, and – with the Winter Olympics still going on, how to measure the distance from a curling stone to the target.
Currently
Ayliean and Scroggs are, of course, generators of the Finite Group, which is where I get much of my maths news these days. Join up to be part of it, and paid members get bonuses like monthly livestreams (next one on Friday March 20th at 4pm UK time) and live podcast recordings.
Rob Eastaway has some free talks coming up: one at the London Interdisciplinary School in Whitechapel, London on Tuesday 10th March at 5pm, and one in Manchester on Thursday March 12th at 5pm.
The LMS Spitalfields History Of Mathematics Meeting and Hirst Lecture are on April 17th at De Morgan House, Russell Square, London from 2:30pm. Online tickets are available; the speakers are Dr Brigitte Stenhouse and Professor June Barrow-Green, who will be talking about Mary Somerville and Hilda Hudson, respectively.
The next Carnival will be at Tony Mann’s maths blog, and you can submit things for it here.
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
Edited 2026-02-25 to correct link to Ayliean’s video. Twice.