Double Maths First Thing feels like this rubber band is getting longer.
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in maths.
This week I’m mainly on childcare duty and watching the calendar until I can pick up a new weather project in September. As always, I’m interested in unusual and quirky maths projects (especially ones that do some good for the planet or the people on it), so hit me up if you feel like a mathematician/developer/writer woud be a good investment.
Links
This week, Ayliean, the Fringe’s hardest-working pretend showhand has a question from her mum (hi, Lorna!) – can a shape be a shape if it’s really three shapes? What we’ve got here are three quornettos – each made of four cones joined together at the base in a loop. The three of them then fit together in a very pleasing way to form a triquornetto that my autistic fingers are LONGING to turn inside out over and over for hours. Ayliean suspects they’re linked to the flexagon family – this I know from nothing, but I wonder if any loyal readers can help?
Tired of the platonic solids? You’ll be wired about the parallelohedra, of which there are also five, but all of which tile Euclidean space in three dimensions. (Via 0xDE on Mathstodon).
A nice problem from reddit: you roll n n-sided dice and tally up how many of each number you roll – so if you rolled six D6s and got 6-4-1-6-6-1, you’d have three 6s, two 1s and a 4 – 6 is the outright winner. What’s the probability of the result being a tie as n gets large? (I have an experimental answer, but not a theoretical one.)
There’s a new season of Sam Hansen and Sadie Witkowski’s Carry the Two podcast, which is focussing on emerging technologies this time – episode 1 is about quantum computing. In related news, this game looks like some people might find it fun.
And in “articles I want to read but likely never will”, here’s an article about using graph theory to write more efficient code.
Currently
Tomorrow (Thursday August 14th, 10am UK time), there’s a Finite Group livestream on space-filling curves. I hope there’ll be a flowsnake!
Tuesday coming (Tuesday August 19th), it’s the traditional day for your local MathsJam – follow that link to find it, or for details on how to start your own.
And if you’re coming to Talking Maths in Public, I hope you’ll be able to join us in the Ensemble Room at Warwick Arts Centre for the Pseudorandom Ensemble show on Wednesday evening. There’ll be a link to reserve a seat in your conference pack, with a suggested contribution of a fiver to help cover costs. It’ll be a blast!
Lastly, I’m hosting this month’s Carnival of Maths – that link is the one to send any interesting and/or important articles to.
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