Double Maths First Thing is the Ultimate Answer.
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to the moon! But I’m also on a mission to spread joy and delight in doing maths anywhere in the cosmos.
Talking of doing maths in strange and hostile environments, I’m going to Bristol this weekend for my Rubik’s cube competition. Going by my current success rate at blindfold, it’s about 60-40 whether I’ll manage to complete a solve.
This week I’ve also been working on a nice combinatorics problem with Zoe Griffiths for her AEOUD talk about finding sets of children’s names with no common letters. I learned that in 2023, at least three families decided to name a child “C”. I don’t like to judge, but that feels even worse than calling them JavaScript.
Links
There’s a breathless, magaziney furore over a link between primes and integer partitions (ArXiv paper here) — it’s not my field, and part of me doesn’t feel very surprised that there’s a link, but having used the method of “Leonhard Euler would have thought of that already” to rebut a “proof” this week, I feel like there’s a corresponding method of “if it was trivial, Ken Ono wouldn’t be publishing it.”
Here’s an old post from David R Hagen about an XKCD cartoon. He wonders “how come the 11th of the month doesn’t show up as often as it should?”
Some curved paper sculptures to make you go oooo! and clap your hands a bit? Yes, please, Erik and Martin Demaine, yes please.
I enjoyed Vanessa Madu’s talk at Big MathsJam about rubber ducks and ocean currents, but I also enjoyed her article about consecutive odd semi-primes, another of those questions that you didn’t know you needed to wonder about, and which then drops out quite neatly. Quack!
Currently
It’s a big couple of weeks for the Finite Group, with a livestream today (June 25th, 2pm UK time) and another in a couple of weeks (Friday July 4th, 7pm UK time) — meaning that joining today for £4 will get you access to both. Bargain!
You’ve got a week or so to submit entries for this month’s Carnival — and I imagine Katie would love it if you volunteered to host a future event. (It’s not that much work if you’ve already got a blog.)
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 (not my full name)