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