Double Maths First Thing is struggling with its J perms
Hello, and happy new year! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy, delight and happiness in not-understanding and then, finally, understanding maths.
I’m getting back into a routine after a couple of weeks of childcare. That means writing, pulling apart weather spreadsheets and helping A-level students get on top of their studies. I’ve also got designs on dramatically improving my blindfold cube-solving, as well as doing it the more boring way, looking as I go.
There’s one last 2025 thing to ruin your next few days with: Thomas Colthurst’s 2025 game, which is like the Only Connect wall but with 45 groups of 45 items.
Important news for 2026 is that Doomsday is Saturday – the last day of February, Pi Day, July 4th, Hallowe’en and Boxing Day all fall on Saturday, as do 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10 and 12/12, 5/9 and 9/5, 11/7 and 7/11.
Links
Slightly after the deadline for last week’s DMFT, Peter Rowlett mentioned he’d been involved in a mathematically interesting Secret Santa. I can’t vouch for it because I haven’t watched it, but I gather it involved excellent people.
No Pseudorandom Ensemble show would be complete without an investigation into how many centres a triangle needs. Songwriter Sam Hartburn (who you should definitely hire if you need creative mathematics, editing or writing) investigates one of them (the nine-point circles) here. I think it’s one of the few that isn’t mentioned in the song.
I don’t play Pokémon, but there is apparently good maths involved. Nicolas Chagnet dives into how one could optimise teams.
Swerving slightly into coding, I enjoyed this piece from Christian Ekrem about some category theory jargon (functors, applicatives and monads) that I only ever get a hazy understanding of. Functors, I understand now. The others, I need to read the article again.
Via Sanjeev’s Carnival (of which more in a minute), a piece by Rodrigo Treviño in the Mathematical Intelligencer about negotiation and game theory.
Currently
The Bridges Maths and Art conference is in Galway this August – there’s a call for submissions in case you want to exhibit or present.
The latest Carnival of mathematics is up, courtesy of Sanjeev at the Scribble Board. You can submit links to the next edition from the Carnival page; it’ll be hosted by Laura at Letters and Words.
If you enjoy DMFT – and I hope you do – you’re likely to enjoy the Finite Group, as much for the cool chat in the Discord as for the monthly livestreams.
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