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Double Maths First Thing: Issue 54

By Colin Beveridge. Posted April 15, 2026

Double Maths First Thing is playing 1D chess.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the delight and joy of doing maths, and trying really hard to communicate that it’s not just about arithmetic.

The kids have finally gone back to school after the Easter break (where the 10yo is currently being crammed for the SATs, which appear to a large extent to be just about arithmetic). Hopefully I’ve done enough to convince him otherwise.

A quick apology to email readers: I misnumbered the last issue, which appeared to be a repeat of #52. We should be back on track today with #54. To make up for it, I’ve compiled some cracking links.

Links

You know who else doesn’t think maths is just arithmetic? Terry Tao and Zack Wienersmith, that’s who! (Although I note that an imaginary Erdős number is conferred via the wearing of Erdős’s coat – or the coat of someone who has worn the coat of someone with an Erdős number that’s not on the real line. Mine is thus \( 5+i \). Also, I left my jacket in Atlanta, so I hope there’s an enterprising janitor somewhere with an Erdos number of \( 2i \).)

Next up, an incredible discovery: a calculator with two buttons – one with the constant 1 and another with the function \( EML(x,y) = \exp(x) – \ln(y) \) – can (in principle) do everything a scientific calculator can.
Paper by Andrzej Odrzywołek here. This is a phenomenal thing to even think about, let alone figure out.

We’re still struggling with the switch to BST here, so I was heartened to learn from @amapanda about Universal Greeting Time – it’s always morning when someone shows up and evening when they leave.

The success of the Artemis II mission has led to a lot of amazing discussions on Mathstodon, including this Margaret Hamilton anecdote – her daughter crashed the computer and NASA said “no trained astronaut would ever do something so silly”. Guess what happened? There are also great comments in the source code, and a picture of Alan Cooper showing her around the Computer History Museum. If ever someone deserved to be the focus of a musical…

From Elliot Kienzle, slides to a talk about whether maths is big or small. Now I really want Brio track that work on torii.

Currently

Carnival of Mathematics #250 is up at Tom Rocks Maths! You can submit items for #251 (hosted by Karrie Liu) at the usual link.

Congratulations to Peter Rowlett for releasing his first issue of The Mathematical Gazette as editor. You can read more about The Mathematical Gazette here – I know Peter is keen to hear from contributors and reviewers.

Kevin Houston and Costas Loizou are running a free workshop on transitioning into education research, in Leeds and online on Wednesday April 29th. Register by this Friday (April 17th) to attend in-person or by Wednesday April 22nd to participate remotely.

If you’d like your 2D mathematical artwork to be featured at the ICM in Philadelphia, you can let IMAGINARY know about it here. Deadline is April 30.

The LMS Spitalfields History Of Mathematics Meeting and Hirst Lecture are on Friday April 17th at De Morgan House, Russell Square, London from 2:30pm. Online tickets are available; the speakers are Dr Brigitte Stenhouse and Professor June Barrow-Green, who will be talking about Mary Somerville and Hilda Hudson, respectively.

Rounding off a lot of currently, it’s also MathsJam Tuesday next week (April 21st) – show up to one near you, or start your own, and have a play with some puzzles. (I still haven’t quite figured out the circle one from last time. I’ve got an answer, but not a solution.)

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,

Edited 2026-04-15 to close ~~a bracket~~ two separate brackets. Thanks, Mair!

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 27

By Colin Beveridge. Posted June 4, 2025

Double Maths First Thing always takes the weather with it

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to disseminate mathematical joy and the pleasure of figuring things out.

I’m just back from a week in the Peak District, where we discovered that Pete the dog likes neither stepping stones, nor the river that he jumps into to avoid them. Apparently it’s my job to carry wet dogs across rivers, although I don’t remember THAT being in the information pack.

We visited George Green’s windmill in Nottingham, which is unusual in that its science centre doesn’t hide the maths away — Green’s theorem is prominently displayed on banners around the place (although there’s only a limited attempt to explain it.) I’ve just added it to Nerdy Day Trips, which is BACK! (It was very easy to submit, so I recommend adding nerdy day trips you’ve enjoyed.)

I spent the car journey back doing my best to help humanity defeat the evil nonogram: there are about 25,000,000 solvable five-by-five puzzles, and we need to solve them all. After a while, you get into a flow state, it’s quite an experience. [Edited 2025-06-04 to correct number from 25,000]

Links

On to the links! First up, a couple of questions from dear friend Colin Wright: does this theorem have a name in English?, and is there a good ‘why?’ for Marden’s theorem?

In games news, Boggle has been (effectively) solved, and students at Purdue have broken the robot Rubik’s cube world record, with a time of 0.103 seconds. (Incidentally, the 4×4 robot record fell recently — but that’s still significantly slower than the human world record.)

From the Fields medallists doing interesting things beat, Terry Tao has launched a Lean companion to Analysis I — Lean is a “formal verification system” that checks your proofs hold water. Meanwhile, if you’d like a Tim Gowers lecture on why LLMs aren’t better at finding proofs, you should watch one.

Another piece on my to-read-more-carefully list is Aeva’s article on spline fields, for storing and rendering realistic terrains.

Currently

It’s a new month, so there’s a new Carnival of Mathematics: this month’s host hadn’t been posted at press time, but might be before you read this; you’ll be able to find it at Suzza’s Beauty of Mathematics blog.

There’s also a new TMiP Animation Challenge prompt: if you’ve got something to visualise about curves of pursuit, feel free to give it a go. It’s a good excuse to learn a new skill; the Finite Group generators seem to delight in using unconventional approaches like tikZ, but Manim or possibly Lottie appear to me like more reasonable starting points. Last month’s efforts will soon be linked from the same page at TMiP.

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.

Until next time,

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 25

By Colin Beveridge. Posted May 21, 2025

Double Maths First Thing has toothache.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in figuring things out. And take my mind off of the dental work I had done yesterday. Send ibuprofen and puzzles.

Among several reasons to celebrate the election of Nicușor Dan in Romania is that the chap is an accomplished mathematician: he won two IMO gold medals in the 1980s, and I’m told he was one of only 11 candidates to solve the legendary question 6. Future Fields Medallist Terry Tao scored one point out of six. I’m sure Mr Dan has other qualities relevant to running a country as well. In the words of George III, “good luuuuck!”

Links

If we’re talking about Olympiads, Andrei Ciobanu has a long post about the “trickonometry” of IMO inequalities. (I’m slightly on the fence about whether competitive mathematics is a good thing, but Olympiads certainly generate some good problems.)

Among certain world leaders without maths degrees — and why would you elect one of those? — there seems to be a bit of a failure to understand the economic basics of supply and demand. If you’re in the same boat, Jason Fantl’s series on simulated economies is definitely worth reading.

I enjoyed Ben Orlin’s piece on why the number line freaks him out — it feels like a nice, gentle explanation of the different types of number you’ll find on the number line.

But wait… do numbers even exist? What about unicorns? Antoine Chambert-Loir wonders exactly that, finding evidence for all four possibilities.

I’m a bit of a sucker for tiling patterns and for Islamic-inspired art, so Laura Taalman’s post on Girih tiles was catnip to me.

Currently

It’s Finite Group livestream time — I gather this month’s show is about the Rubik’s Cube, which all right-thinking people know is impossible to solve. It’s on Friday 23rd at 7pm UK time; you can join the Finite Group for free, but only paying subscribers get access to the livestreams.

At the Aperiodical, it seems like Katie Steckles’s series on [one] to watch is back from the dead: interviews with maths/science YouTubers about their background, approach and content. And it wouldn’t be Katie if she didn’t ask who the audience is.

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.

Until next time,

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.

Until next time,

Aperiodical News Roundup – November & December 2024

By Katie Steckles. Posted January 11, 2025

Here’s a round-up of some news stories from the last two months of 2024, (mostly) not otherwise covered here on the Aperiodical.

Maths Research

At the start of December, John Carlos Baez shared on Mathstodon that the moving sofa problem may have been solved – the question of the largest possible shape you can fit around a 2D corner. For many years, a shape called Gerver’s sofa has been thought to be optimal, but an ArXiV paper from 29th November claims to have proved it is. More context in this blog post by Dan Romnik.

Depending on what you consider to be maths news, there were also reports that mathematicians have discovered a new type of cardinal numbers and a new kind of infinity.

And depending on what you consider to be good news, Terry Tao has also announced the creation of Renaissance Philanthropy and XTX Markets’ AI for Math fund, supporting projects that apply AI and machine learning to mathematics, with a focus on automated theorem proving. The deadline for initial expressions of interest is Jan 10, 2025.

Awards and Appointments

Computer algebra system PARI/GP has been awarded a CNRS prize “Prix science ouverte du logiciel libre de la recherche” (Open Science Awards for Free Software for Research). The awards highlight exceptional or very promising achievements, which can inspire the scientific community as well as society as a whole. An estimated user community of 25,000 people use PARI/GP regularly for research and hobbyist number theory. (via Rémi Eismann on SeqFan)

The other big news from last December was Hannah Fry’s appointment as Cambridge’s new Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics. She joined the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) on 1st January, and the role will involve communicating to diverse audiences, including with people not previously interested in maths. Fry follows in the footsteps of the late John Barrow, who informally took on the same role for much of his distinguished career.

“Communication is not an optional extra: if you are creating something that is used by, or interacts with members of the public or the world in general, then I think it’s genuinely your moral duty to engage the people affected by it. I’d love to build and grow a community around excellence in mathematical communication at Cambridge – so that we’re really researching the best possible methods to communicate with people.”
– Hannah Fry

Other news

From now until 11th February, Young Researcher applications for the Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2025 are open to any undergraduate/pre-master, PhD or PostDoc researchers who would like to join the highest level of mathematical laureates alongside hundreds of other researchers in maths and computer science for a week of talks, workshops and networking in the beautiful city of Heidelberg in September.

Double Maths First Thing: Issue 11

By Colin Beveridge. Posted January 1, 2025

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:

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.

Until next time,

Aperiodical News Roundup – December 2023

By Katie Steckles. Posted January 4, 2024

Here’s a round-up of a few newsy things we didn’t cover on the site in the month of December.