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Double Maths First Thing: Issue 33

By Colin Beveridge. Posted August 27, 2025

Double Maths First Thing is at about 3.5/5 on the ready-to-rock-o-meter

HELLO $CURRENT_LOCATION! Sorry, hang on, the show isn’t until tonight. Let me switch off rock god mode and try again.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of doing maths for its own sake, puzzling things out, and sharing it with friends and strangers. To that end, I’m on my way to the Talking Maths in Public conference at Warwick University – do stop and say hello if you see me there. And, of course, get your Pseudorandom Ensemble tickets before tonight’s performance.

It’s been raining links this week, so I’ll get straight on with it.

Links

For a while back there, everyone was playing 2048, and then people kept saying “but Threes is so much better!”. Alex Fink’s Dive is more mathematical than either, and just as frustrating.

The rest of the links are unusually arty this week. Let’s start with Ana Dodik et al’s amazing work on Meschers, meshes for representing impossible objects.

Also artistic and neat: an anamorphosis simulation by Charles Petzold. What’s that, then? It’s a technique for making art that looks like something (e.g., Mary, Queen of Scots) from one angle and something else (e.g., a skull) from another.

Not really maths-related, but lovely all the same: the cutaway illustrations of Fred Freeman.

But far and away my biggest art rabbit-hole recently: Andrew Taylor is very much at it again, making tools to produce dithered QR codes that (a) scan and (b) look meaningful. (This builds on work by Erik Demaine and I was pointed at it by Dave Richeson.)

Currently

A nice-looking upcoming conference on algorithms in the creative arts: Alpaca 2025, in Sheffield and online from September 12th-14th. (Please join my campaign to call baby alpacas ‘alpacinos’.)

I’m in the hot-seat for this month’s Carnival of mathematics, so use that link to send me anything you’d like to share in the August post.

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 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,

C