Double Maths First Thing is not, and has never been, down with the kids.
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in maths, puzzles and problem-solving.
I’m just back from a week in Germany, where the highlight was the Heinz Nixdorf Museumsforum in Paderborn, a fantastic history of computing museum. I spent the whole afternoon going “THIS IS SO COOL!” and “I’ll catch you up, I need to get a picture of this.” It’s a super-rare three Michelin stars sort of museum.
Links
While the eclipse (as documented previously) was won by a skateboarder, here’s a close runner-up. Meanwhile, here’s a wonderful Desmos Doodle from Fractal Kitty
In elliptic curve news: there have been discovered one of rank 30 and another of rank 31 – the previous record was 29, and had stood for a couple of years. I do not know what that means or why it’s important, but it sounds that way. Similarly, Robin points to a new length-5905 superpermutation, which I understand better but not well.
The 12yo – who came up with the fantastic multilingual pun of “Doe, a deer, a female deer; Reh, a deer, a German deer” while we were away – has been trying to build a chess engine in Scratch. He’ll be interested to read a thread on a useful bit-twiddling hack. Elsewhere in games, Simon Tatham is doing evil hat/t-shirt things to Minesweeper.
The Scottish contingent (hi, Ayliean and Lorna! hi, Chris!) have pointed me at a couple of silly-season stories knowing that I would sigh and commiserate. Here’s Greggs with a meaningless formula – I assumed that Q was queue length, but no, it’s something to do with a “quicnic”, and I am defecting to Pret. In the world of golf, the BBC report on a probability calculation but don’t provide anything to allow one to check it. (I bet they’ve assumed independence. Also, I gather there are about a billion rounds of golf played every year, so one in 332 billion feels a lot less impressive.)
Breathe, Colin, breathe. Let’s relax with a mesmerising map of trains across central and western Europe and a deep dive into geodesy.
Currently
The deadline for this month’s Carnival of Mathematics is fast approaching: submit your links here so Karen Campe can assemble them into a post. (I gather her birthday is also fast approaching. Many happy returns, Karen!)
Also also fast approaching is the deadline for August’s TMiP Animation Collaboration, where the theme is RANDOMNESS.
You’re all coming to see the Pseudorandom Ensemble at MathsWorld on Monday 21st September, correct?
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