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Double Maths First Thing: Issue 24

By Colin Beveridge. Posted May 14, 2025

Double Maths First Thing wishes it could be formatted as a square

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in figuring things out. The 11yo is doing SATs at the moment, which runs exactly counter to that goal.

What runs parallel to the goal is MathsJam, which takes place around the world every month; most places meet on Tuesday 20th, but check to see your local date. If you don’t have a local Jam? You can set up your own, you just need a friendly pub and some people to maths with. The site will tell you more.

I mentioned last week about the horror show that is return periods; I wrote up the problem and my solution. I’d also like to shout out Georgii Bocharov’s excellent pyextremes package, which saved me weeks of doing a worse job with it.

You’ll also be pleased to hear that my Toastmasters talk went well, and that the stone-louse’s mischievous giggle went down a storm.

Links

In things I want to know about but haven’t made time to read, here’s Katie Steckles on representation theory.

Another friend of DMFT, Rob Eastaway, has an article about trying extreme cases to see whether your instinct holds water.

I also enjoyed Sam Rose’s latest post on reservoir sampling — I’ve used the technique frequently, and understand why it works, but this felt like a much clearer explanation than I’ve seen before.

By now you probably know that I’m a sucker for an article that digs unnecessarily deep into a topic I previously didn’t realise existed. For example, what proportion of the US’s exports are blood?

Currently

There a lot of events I want to mention coming up — on top of the Pseudorandom Ensemble‘s show at Warwick Arts Centre in August — so I’ll list them all at once:

• Although it clashes with MathsJam, Ashleigh Ratcliffe is talking at the Pint of Science festival in Leicester on May 20th
• James Arthur is doing a show at the Brighton Fringe from May 24-26. That’s three separate shows, not one really long one.
• Ingrid Daubechies is giving the Bakerian Lecture at the RI on June 2nd.
• Katie Steckles and Ben Sparks are giving maths communication workshops on June 11th in Edinburgh and June 24th online.

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

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 23

By Colin Beveridge. Posted May 7, 2025

Double Maths First Thing will sign autographs, form an orderly queue

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in mathematical practice.

Last week, the Pseudorandom Ensemble gave our first performance, A Totally Normal Song live at the Clopen Mic Night. At the moment, the video is still up and available to watch. I’m really pleased with how it went, and we’re looking forward to an in-person gig at Warwick Arts Centre in August. Once we’ve learned a few more songs, that is.

Links

I enjoyed this paper by Jacob Siehler about port-and-sweep solitaire — I thought it was neat how a relatively simple game could be modelled with some much more sophisticated maths.

On my to-read list is Perette Barella’s piece on the Collatz conjecture, which looks like it goes a bit deeper than most such pieces.

Aybüke Yılmaz has a lovely piece on square Sufic calligraphy. Also in the art world, I’ve recently come across turtlestitch, which seems like the sort of thing that would steal entire weekends from me if I allowed it to.

I’m giving a talk at my local Toastmasters group tonight, and while this article didn’t exactly tell me anything new, it’s still advice worth sharing.

And if you’re after a Terry Tao-approved challenge, you could always try to decompose 300,000! into the product of 300,000 factors, all of which are larger than 100,000. I especially like this: it’s a simple-to-state problem that would make most non-mathematicians say “why on earth would you want to do that?” but gives some people an itch they have to scratch.

Currently

This month’s Carnival of Mathematics is hosted by Karen Campe. Susan at Beauty of Mathematics is in the hot-seat next time, and you can submit your interesting maths here. (And you should email me about it. I miss a lot of cool things.)

People who are more up on this You Tube thing than I am tell me that Tibees is self-publishing a book about 4D. I’m not watching all that, but it’s exciting to people whose judgement I trust.

Speaking of videos, Grant Sanderson’s Summer of Math(s) Exposition is open again, and April’s TMiP animation challenge is over and rounded up. May’s challenge is to animate a proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem.

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

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 22

By Colin Beveridge. Posted April 30, 2025

Double Maths First Thing is HORRIFIED and you should be too.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight, so obviously I’m going to start with something awful: I recently learned that a “one-year flood” is not remotely the same thing as a “365-day flood”. In fairness, they don’t usually go down to timespans that short, but it’s important for something I’m modelling. (As I understand it, a one-year flood is certain to happen in a given year. A 365-day flood has a 1/365 chance of occurring on any given day, hence occurs in a given year with probability of about 62%. I don’t like it.)

More pleasingly, I get to offer a gold star to Lew Baxter, who took up the challenge of integrating sec(x) from last time out and coded it up in Prolog. I won’t pretend to follow the code, but I’m assured it found the correct answer in considerably less than 99 years.

Links

We’re coming into the checks notes merry month of May-ing; in England, at least, that means maypole dancing. Dogs are optional, I understand. Dave Richeson has written about the maths thereof. Maypoles, not dogs. (A tip of the hat to Mair in the Finite Group).

From poles to entire planets. I was delighted by the look of the A5 geospatial system, which divides the surface of the globe into (almost) equal-area pentagons. Lovely stuff. Meanwhile, ZenoRogue has some ideas about plotting on spheres, and Matt Zucker combines my loves of truncated icosahedra and Truchet tiles

A thing of beauty: Ismail al-Jazarī’s Mechanical Devices. I certainly owned a translation of this once, but I fear I left it with an ex many years ago.

While I’m a fan of Slay the Spire, I’ve never played Magic: The Gathering. Manon Bischoff in Scientific American outlines how you can develop a Magic deck that goes infinite, but only if the twin primes conjecture is true. (Here’s the much-missed Vicky Neale talking on the subject — Closing The Gap is an excellent read.)

Currently

If you’re near a computer tomorrow night (Thursday May 1st, 8-9pm UK time), you should definitely check out the Clopen Mic Night — a pay-what-you-want variety show that, for one night only, features the Pseudorandom Ensemble. I’ll be singing a verse.

THIS Saturday (don’t get me started), which is May 3rd, Rob Eastaway is talking Shakespeare at the RI in London. That’s a 2pm kick-off, you’ll need tickets in advance.

Some conferences of interest: Bridges is in Eindhoven in July and Talking Maths in Public in in Warwick in August. I’ll definitely be at TMiP. There are rumours of a PRE gig, but I couldn’t possibly let that slip yet.

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

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 21

By Colin Beveridge. Posted April 23, 2025

No dragons were harmed in the making of Double Maths First Thing.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in numerical noodling, patterny playfulness and generally messing about with maths.

This week I’m back at my desk after a long Easter break. There are stories to write, bugs to catch and some travelling to do. On with the show!

Links

Let’s start this week with Dominika Vasilkova’s inspirational article about cardioids in coffee cups, which deserves more credit. Geometry and coffee, what’s not to like?

Something I very much don’t like (yet) is multiplying 0.333… by 0.444… without using fractions to get 0.148148…. I find it deeply disturbing. Richard Plagge explains how it works, and I would certainly not recommend using a site like Sci-Hub or note that the paper’s DOI reference was 10.2307/3026549. That would be irresponsible and probably lead to the collapse of the whole publishing industry.

Something that does use fractions is Conway’s ridiculous programming language, Fractran. Reginald Braithwaite has a nice write-up of it.

Another thing that uses fractions, but incorrectly, is Iceland’s parliamentary voting system, which assigns top-up seats per region based on the national vote. That’s a Good System in my book — unfortunately, they use the wrong formula. Unlike Geneva, which rocks.

One more troublesome fraction thing? Oh, go on then. Here’s Lior Sinai’s story of how it took almost 100 years to integrate sec(x), and how it was discovered experimentally.

Currently

There’s a Finite Group livestream next week — you should definitely join up and send them money. If you did, you’d be able to watch Scroggs and Katie talk about squares. Who better?

I can also remind you that the Pseudorandom Ensemble will be headlining — or at least going on last — at the Clopen Mic night on Thursday May 1st. The show starts at 8pm, and it’s pay-what-you-like.

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

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 20

By Colin Beveridge. Posted April 16, 2025

Double Maths First Thing doesn’t look an issue older than 1F

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy in the creativity and beauty of maths, in the delight of figuring things out and asking more questions. This week, I’ve been playing with continued fractions, and finally have a better sense of how to compute them for a given square root. There may be a blog post ahead.

I’m finally able to confirm that the Pseudorandom Ensemble (one of the UK’s top ten mathematically-inspired musical combos, and of which I form a fraction) will be performing at the Clopen mic night on May 1st from 8pm, doing something perfectly normal. It’s free, although donations are encouraged.

Links

Some weeks I struggle to find any good links, but this week — possibly because I’m on Easter break and checking mathstodon more frequently than usual — I’ve almost got too many.

Let’s start in Ukraine, where there’s been precious little good news recently: however, President (and voice of Paddington) Volodymyr Zelenskyy has recently opened the Cuboid Museum of Mathematics in (if my Cyrillic deciphering is correct) Kyiv. I hope to visit it in a peaceful future.

Back in issue 17, I mentioned a variation on the Elo method used in chess rankings — I love such things. Elo is great, but limited by its assumptions; I’ve recently seen two more variations that try to get around this: Microsoft’s TrueSkill2 and Mark Glickman’s Glicko. If only there were some way to figure out which was better.

While we’re on the subject of uncertainty, Filip Hráček has a lovely calculator for use with inexact data. It’s adequate~amazing.

In the world of mathematical crafting, Anisa du Plessis has a fantastic article about the maths of crochet, which is worth skimming for the pictures alone.

Currently

At the Aperiodical, Elinor has reviewed some of the art inspired by Ayliean’s Math Art March prompts — again, plenty of gorgeous visuals here.

Tuesday coming is the traditional day for the April MathsJam — as usual, I’ll be at the Weymouth version, and you can find your local one — or find out how to start your own — 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