Double Maths First Thing: Issue 8

Double Maths First Thing is Colin’s refuge from the kids’ obsession with Odd Squad.

Hello, and welcome to Double Maths First Thing! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight in my subject.

It’s half-term week, so this is necessarily rushed, brief, and poorly formatted — but it’s Big MathsJam at the weekend, so I expect to more than make up for the brevity next week.

On my list of things to contemplate on the long journey northwards:

• Miles Gould has pointed me at the Capstan Equation, not to be confused with Captain Caveman. Wrapping a line around a cylinder makes it possible to hold much heavier loads than one would naively expect.
• Devine Lu Linvega has a zine about rewriting rules, which appeals to me.
• The train wifi is unable to allow me to watch Sophie Maclean talk about voting paradoxes on Numberphile, much as I would love to.
• The Finite Group’s birthday livestream included Peter Rowlett talking about Carnelli, a game which involves running film titles together — the canonical example is The Empire Strikes Back To The Future. I’m enjoying subverting it (Run Lola Run Lola Run, or On the Waterfronthe Waterfront, or somehow making Zero Dark Thirty and 300 into a loop). What interesting things can you do with it?
• There is a lot of discussion currently about the number of holes in a straw (which is obviously and unambiguously one). If you join the ends together to make a loop, how many holes are there now? If you sew up the top of a sock, how many holes does that contain?

If you’re going to be at Big MathsJam, I hope I’ll see you there! I’ll be talking about HyperRogue, but you risk accidental spoilers if you click through.

In the meantime, 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.

That’s all for this week! 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 I should be aware of.

Until next time,

C