Double Maths First Thing needs to collect its tickets, don’t let it forget.
Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of maths as far and wide as possible.
This week, I’m steeling myself up for a double whammy of a long train journey and trusting the computer shop to repair my power supply, both of which are enormously stressful.
Links
I’m not on BlueSky (I lose enough time to mathstodon, thank you very much), but some of the prolific ex-Twitterers are still doing whatever you do on BlueSky these days. Andrew Stacey has collated what he thinks is a complete collection of Catriona Agg’s geometry puzzles. Catriona is a superstar. Andrew’s a good egg, too.
In the good place, Amapanda cracks her knuckles and finds the towns furthest from a Wetherspoons. The interesting thing for me is the discussion about “what does town mean?” and “what does furthest mean?”.
Modelling sport mathematically always seems fraught with problems – the difficulty with humans is that they get all emotional and don’t follow the model – but Gabel and Redner have found that they can model “essentiall all statistical features of basketball” with a random walk model. Cool!
Need a random number and don’t have a die to hand? Jon Bentley in Programming Pearls has some ways you can code something up, assuming you’re too good for random.random().
Finally, a puzzle game: Ain’t It Funny How The Knight Moves?, a challenge to visit every square on the board that isn’t attacked by a queen.
Currently
There may be a few tickets left for Big MathsJam in Milton Keynes this weekend (November 21-23) – online attendance is available and I’m pretty sure that if you like DMFT, you’ll love MathsJam.
I’ve not yet got my hands on a copy of the new Chalkdust magazine (I’ll put that right this weekend), but on Tuesday 25th their book club will be discussing Matt Parker’s Humble Pi.
You’ll want to submit anything for the next Carnival of Maths, hosted by Tom Briggs, via the Carnival submission page.
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