Hello! My name is Colin, and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight in doing maths. 👋
Not everyone takes delight in anagrams, but being clever, I do: delightfully, Sarina Wiegman is an anagram of “I win as manager”. 😄
Links
Speaking of jumbling up letters, Tom Snelling has collated all of the books in the Library of Babel, a peculiar and slightly mathematical short story by Jorge Luis Borges.
In somewhat sad, but also «the dude was 97 and got to spend most of his life doing maths» news, Tom Lehrer died last week. He’s very much on the vision board of people I want to be like when I don’t grow up. Here is a lovely story about a reference in his work, and I’ll note a degree of gladness that we didn’t all go together after all. 😟
I’m looking forward to reading this, on convolutions, from Eli Bendersky.
Need some puzzles to while away the long summer? I know I do. For an hourly Countdown variant, follow the Hectoc bot, and for a daily «come up with a nice solution to a puzzle from AMS with a known answer» follow Suat Ayöz.
And here’s an article on knots in New Scientist that’s behind a paywall, which I linked to before realising it quotes my dear friend Nicholas Jackson. You definitely shouldn’t go to the archived version, that would be immoral.
Currently
If you’re in Edinburgh this weekend, Coburg House has an open house, where mathematical knitter Madeleine Shepherd will have work for sale.
Time is running out to submit an item to this month’s Carnival of maths and to this month’s TMiP animation challenge.
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