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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.

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 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.

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