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Double Maths First Thing: Issue 28

By Colin Beveridge. Posted June 11, 2025

Double Maths First Thing is bringing the thunder

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in playing with patterns, puzzles, figures and logic.

First up, an apology: in last week’s issue, I mistyped the number of solvable nonograms: rather than 25,000, there are 25,000,000. As of Tuesday evening, humanity has solved about 27% of them. Good work, fellow humans!

Links

One fellow human doing good nonogram work is Lucas Cimon, who has developed code to generate nonogram QR codes. He says it will likely be “difficult to solve manually”.

Since we’re looking at puzzles and logic, all-round good egg Tony Mann has pointed me at a remarkable 4-by-4 sudoku and Cracking the Cryptic’s solution video. Meanwhile, there’s a ferocious argument going on in the group chat about Zp-ordle, the daily puzzle game for people who think Wordle needs more p-adic integers. (Which is everyone, right?)

There’s one question on everyone’s lips: “Will Jesus Christ return in an election year?” Eric Neyman explains why the likelihood given on Polymarket is 3%, considerably higher than most analysts would predict.

Meanwhile, here’s Hannah Fry peeling an orange.

And in mental arithmetic news, Niklas Oberhuber estimates some logarithms. (I particularly liked that 5^10 is about 9.8 million, which I’ll store in the Useful Approximations drawer of my brain.)

Currently

It’s mid-month, which means that your local MathsJam is coming up soon (Tuesday 17th in many locations, including Weymouth). Find yours here, or email Katie to find out how to start your own.

The 240th Carnival of Mathematics now has a link at Beauty of Mathematics. Similarly, the TMiP animation playlist for May is live.

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,

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 27

By Colin Beveridge. Posted June 4, 2025

Double Maths First Thing always takes the weather with it

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to disseminate mathematical joy and the pleasure of figuring things out.

I’m just back from a week in the Peak District, where we discovered that Pete the dog likes neither stepping stones, nor the river that he jumps into to avoid them. Apparently it’s my job to carry wet dogs across rivers, although I don’t remember THAT being in the information pack.

We visited George Green’s windmill in Nottingham, which is unusual in that its science centre doesn’t hide the maths away — Green’s theorem is prominently displayed on banners around the place (although there’s only a limited attempt to explain it.) I’ve just added it to Nerdy Day Trips, which is BACK! (It was very easy to submit, so I recommend adding nerdy day trips you’ve enjoyed.)

I spent the car journey back doing my best to help humanity defeat the evil nonogram: there are about 25,000,000 solvable five-by-five puzzles, and we need to solve them all. After a while, you get into a flow state, it’s quite an experience. [Edited 2025-06-04 to correct number from 25,000]

Links

On to the links! First up, a couple of questions from dear friend Colin Wright: does this theorem have a name in English?, and is there a good ‘why?’ for Marden’s theorem?

In games news, Boggle has been (effectively) solved, and students at Purdue have broken the robot Rubik’s cube world record, with a time of 0.103 seconds. (Incidentally, the 4×4 robot record fell recently — but that’s still significantly slower than the human world record.)

From the Fields medallists doing interesting things beat, Terry Tao has launched a Lean companion to Analysis I — Lean is a “formal verification system” that checks your proofs hold water. Meanwhile, if you’d like a Tim Gowers lecture on why LLMs aren’t better at finding proofs, you should watch one.

Another piece on my to-read-more-carefully list is Aeva’s article on spline fields, for storing and rendering realistic terrains.

Currently

It’s a new month, so there’s a new Carnival of Mathematics: this month’s host hadn’t been posted at press time, but might be before you read this; you’ll be able to find it at Suzza’s Beauty of Mathematics blog.

There’s also a new TMiP Animation Challenge prompt: if you’ve got something to visualise about curves of pursuit, feel free to give it a go. It’s a good excuse to learn a new skill; the Finite Group generators seem to delight in using unconventional approaches like tikZ, but Manim or possibly Lottie appear to me like more reasonable starting points. Last month’s efforts will soon be linked from the same page at TMiP.

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.

Until next time,

Manchester MathsJam writeup, April 2013

By Katie Steckles. Posted April 25, 2013

MathsJam this month fell on the day before my birthday, which meant not only was our ‘Jam well supplied with birthday cake, but there was a jubilant mood only aided by the presence of some puzzles I’d written for my birthday party. Everyone had a good crack at the maths-related one, and found it entertaining (see: future Puzzlebombs, where said puzzles will almost certainly feature).