Hello! My name is Colin, and I’m a mathematician determined to shake off this pesky cold before the weekend. I’m supposed to be in Peterborough to rehearse for the PRE show in August. Have I mentioned that before? We’re performing at the Warwick Arts Centre as part of Talking Maths in Public.
Speaking of TMiP (and I know this belongs under «Currently», but consistency is more important than continuity), the animation challenge for July is underway. Can you demonstrate that two reflections result in a rotation?
As I said, I’m not feeling my best this week (which might explain, if not excuse, my triple DNF at the cubing competition; I’ll be trying again in September. One of them was very close, but you don’t get anything for that), so I’ll keep DMFT correspondingly brief.
Links
A fascinating/disturbing thing to start with this week: James Haydon tries to treat the UK passport application service like a game and hacks his way to success.
The only disturbing thing about Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzles Collection is the amount of time it has consumed over the years. His version of Minesweeper — which, unlike the version that comes with a popular OS, is always solvable — is twenty years old.
I’m a big fan of mediocre football. I grew up somewhere without a serious football team (Scotland), so I appreciate the benefits of being a bit rubbish. If Alan Turing had been better at chess, computers might not have become so popular.
Another great name in British espionage and subterfuge was William Playfair, who — among other villainous deeds — invented (or at least popularised) the pie chart.
Meanwhile, there’s been some excitement over the recently constructed monostable tetrahedron, a shape that always lands on the same face. The paper claims they built and lost a model in the 1980s. It’s not lost; it’s on Colin Wright’s desk, potato patato.
Lastly, here’s a guide to factoring from Orman and Schroeppel.
Currently
The deadline for the next Carnival is… not approaching as quickly as I thought. It’s a double-header, and posts need to be submitted by August 1st.
What is approaching quickly is the next Finite Group livestream: all four generators will be trying to tell us something we don’t know on Friday, July 4th (7 pm UK time). Free membership grants you access to the Discord, where all the cool people hang out, and paid memberships allow you to watch the livestreams, as well as other goodies.
That’s all I’ve got for this week. If you have friends and/or colleagues who would enjoy Double Maths First Thing, please 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