Double Maths First Thing: Issue 22

Double Maths First Thing is HORRIFIED and you should be too.

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread joy and delight, so obviously I’m going to start with something awful: I recently learned that a “one-year flood” is not remotely the same thing as a “365-day flood”. In fairness, they don’t usually go down to timespans that short, but it’s important for something I’m modelling. (As I understand it, a one-year flood is certain to happen in a given year. A 365-day flood has a 1/365 chance of occurring on any given day, hence occurs in a given year with probability of about 62%. I don’t like it.)

More pleasingly, I get to offer a gold star to Lew Baxter, who took up the challenge of integrating sec(x) from last time out and coded it up in Prolog. I won’t pretend to follow the code, but I’m assured it found the correct answer in considerably less than 99 years.

Links

We’re coming into the checks notes merry month of May-ing; in England, at least, that means maypole dancing. Dogs are optional, I understand. Dave Richeson has written about the maths thereof. Maypoles, not dogs. (A tip of the hat to Mair in the Finite Group).

From poles to entire planets. I was delighted by the look of the A5 geospatial system, which divides the surface of the globe into (almost) equal-area pentagons. Lovely stuff. Meanwhile, ZenoRogue has some ideas about plotting on spheres, and Matt Zucker combines my loves of truncated icosahedra and Truchet tiles

A thing of beauty: Ismail al-Jazarī’s Mechanical Devices. I certainly owned a translation of this once, but I fear I left it with an ex many years ago.

While I’m a fan of Slay the Spire, I’ve never played Magic: The Gathering. Manon Bischoff in Scientific American outlines how you can develop a Magic deck that goes infinite, but only if the twin primes conjecture is true. (Here’s the much-missed Vicky Neale talking on the subject — Closing The Gap is an excellent read.)

Currently

If you’re near a computer tomorrow night (Thursday May 1st, 8-9pm UK time), you should definitely check out the Clopen Mic Night — a pay-what-you-want variety show that, for one night only, features the Pseudorandom Ensemble. I’ll be singing a verse.

THIS Saturday (don’t get me started), which is May 3rd, Rob Eastaway is talking Shakespeare at the RI in London. That’s a 2pm kick-off, you’ll need tickets in advance.

Some conferences of interest: Bridges is in Eindhoven in July and Talking Maths in Public in in Warwick in August. I’ll definitely be at TMiP. There are rumours of a PRE gig, but I couldn’t possibly let that slip yet.

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