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Double Maths First Thing: Issue 35

By Colin Beveridge. Posted September 10, 2025

DMFT turns around, and every now and then it falls apart

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in mathematics. I’m tutoring a bit of Further Core Pure 1 this year, and it was quite instructive to do a paper and find that I’m not immune to careless arithmetic errors or missing entire sections of a question. Oops. (It’s also reminded me that there are things I understand only at a shallow level and that means I get to do some exciting thinking soon.)

Two admin notes: firstly, my apologies to Helena Verrill, whose name I misspelt in last week’s email. I’ve corrected it on the Aperiodical version, but obviously I can’t fix an email after it goes out. Sorry, Helena!

Secondly, I mentioned a dice problem a few issues back, but forgot to mention that it’s a variant of the Ross-Littlewood paradox.

Links

We had a lunar eclipse at the weekend! Only I messed up my timings and missed totality. I did produce representations of my (very likely flawed) mental models of lunar phases and lunar eclipses.

A few months ago, I referred to a monostable tetrahedron that had been discovered both in theory, and on Colin Wright’s desk. Matt Parker has a video about it.

Speaking of the moon and of Colin, he recently shared a video of our dearly-missed mutual friend Adam Atkinson, telling the heavy boots story. I’ve certainly shared that before, but it’s always a delightful memory.

There are many pressing problems in the world. One of the most pressing is, of course, how to cut an onion into the most regular pieces possible.

Not strictly maths-related, but I was inspired by the story of Frances Oldham Kelsey on Cautionary Tales, standing up for science when it would have been politically much easier to fold.

I think we can all agree that anyone who tries to map the Earth on a 2D surface is fighting a losing battle – but at the same time, some efforts are more valiant than others. This project aims to get the areas right, at least.

As a key (and occasionally off-key) member of the Pseudorandom Ensemble, I’m a fan of pseudorandom things – such as, for instance, a method of producing pseudorandom numbers in one’s head. (Meanwhile, Kit Yates is rocking some of our merch.)

Currently

If you’re in charge of children and want to do some maths with them – and what else would you do? – Alison Kiddle and Katie Steckles’s 15 Minute Maths Shop is open for business.

The final TMiP animation challenge of the year is drawing to a close – if you want to animate something related to space-filling curves, you can share your work there.

Margaret Low, who ran a reportedly excellent workshop at TMiP, is running a free online introduction to Turtlestitch next Wednesday, September 17th. Details here.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has a call for mathematical art for a common room. Deadline for proposals is December 1st.

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