Double Maths First Thing is like a tall, dark stranger with some coal and some whisky
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy into 2025 and beyond. I note that 1/1/2025 is the first day since September 25th, 1936 where the day, month and year are all square numbers. I’ve even delayed today’s DMFT to go live at 09:00:00 (UTC), because it is absolutely hip to be square. Peter Rowlett has collected several other numerical facts about 2025.
Happy new year, all. Now, on with the show!
Links
There were several SET-related questions in the last MathsJam Shout. One that wasn’t, but was inspired by it, was: what’s the largest number of cards you can have so that no three of them form a set? Via Martin Whitworth, Benjamin Lent Davis and Diane Maclagan have you covered. And if that doesn’t cover you enough, Tanya Khovanova explores more SET maths here.
Another question you didn’t know you needed an answer to: which net of the dodecahedron is the narrowest?
On my ever-growing to-read list:
- Terry Tao on quaternions
- Sam Rose on Turing machines
- Evan Miller on sorting by average rating
- John Mount on the Kelly criterion
That’s all I’ve got for you 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
Some of the best mathematical teasers are those which originate in a real-world problem – although the problem for pure mathematicians is that that happens much less often than it does for applied mathematicians, who are presented with interesting real-world problems all the time. That’s why it’s especially nice when a more pure one pops up, and that’s exactly what happened to mathematician Jacob E Goodman, back in 1975.