Hello! My name is Colin, and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy and delight, even when I’m not feeling much of either. December is a tough month for me: routines get broken, I have to be sociable, and there isn’t enough daylight.
Now I’ve somewhat recovered from Big MathsJam, I’m happy to report that I had a whale of a time there — the new venue being a couple of hours closer helped me a lot. I think my highlights were:
* Kristin Ohlmann’s talk about decorating a unicycle;
* Ally Stanley’s bit on trying to ride every tube line as fast as possible;
* Scroggs doing Scroggs things with a squared-square puzzle.
It was also pointed out to me that by posting periodically at the Aperiodical, I’m subverting the good name of the site. I argue that there’s a glitch in the periodicity every time we change the clocks, so it’s not quite periodical.
Links
Since we’re on the subject of unicycles, Declan Chidlow answers some frequently-asked questions.
Robin Houston has posted a dissection puzzle, a variation on one I love.
In «things that are lovely to play with» news, here is:
* a very satisfying Voronoi diagram generator;
a thing that goes boing*;
* a challenge to see how quickly you can draw a cool S.
I enjoyed a post by Alistair Bird about — with a certain degree of nominative determinism — pigeonholes.
And I was intrigued to learn there’s a fairly simple version of the four-colouring problem that’s unsolved: the earth-moon problem. I imagine there are many equally-simple unsolved problems in that field.
Currently
December is, of course, advent calendar season. Which means it’s nearly Christmas, and something terrible has happened in the Scroggsverse. There’s a shortened Advent of Code, as well as an Advent of Maths. Meanwhile, DMFT favourite Karen Campe has dug up an old Calendar of Problems.
New month, new Carnival: Tom Briggs is this month’s ringmaster. Sanjeev at The Scribble Board is in charge next month, and you can submit articles (or videos, or whatever you like) for it here.
I’ve also got my hands on the new Chalkdust magazine, including Mats Vermeeren’s write-up of my highlight of last Big MathsJam and Donovan Young explaining entropy. Plus the «famously fiendish» crossnumber.
Katie Steckles will be giving the Liverpool Maths Society Newstead Memorial Christmas Lecture about fractals on Tuesday, December 9th, 1:30 pm in the Sherrington Building at the University of Liverpool. Go along and tell her she’s awesome, or simply buy some of the 15-minute maths activities she’s developed with Alison Kiddle.
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