Mathematical Gift Guide 2023

Since it’s the time of year when you might be looking for mathematical gifts to buy for your friends, colleagues and loves ones, I thought I’d share some recommendations and suggestions for places to find gifts online.

The obvious starting point for any mathematical gift quest is our friends over at Maths Gear, who have their usual excellent selection of gifts, toys, games and household goods. Personal favourites include the squared square coasters (inspired by a set James Grime originally got made up as a gift for my wedding), James’ lovely Drinkulator mug, and these fab mug/donut earrings (which I had a pair of but sadly lost one, not sure which).

On the subject of jewellery, if you’re in the US it’s worth checking out Hanusa Design, who have a great range of 3D printed jewellery (in coloured nylon, and gold/silver). They do ship worldwide but it’s a bit pricey (£35 shipping!), and some of the products take a few weeks to prep if they’re not in stock already – but there’s some gorgeous stuff on there, including these Forbidden Subgraph Earrings which I love.

Present Indicative, an excellently-named gift shop which sells ‘beautiful, practical and intelligent gifts for thinking people’ has an entire collection of mathematical gifts, including these lovely pudding bowls with mathematical proofs on, a few good popular maths books and some nice mugs and accessories. Particularly loving the ‘outlier’ badge.

I was recently reminded of the excellent Pseudorhombicuboctahedron tshirt, which was created as a mashup of a very time-specific meme and as far as I’m aware, partly to troll me (I love it so much), but is available along with a selection of other great maths items on the Aperiodical Teemill shop, and also the Aperiodical RedBubble shop which can also print onto homewares like mugs and cushions. There’s also a wealth of goodies on other print-on-demand sites like RedBubble, including the classic ‘I (red circle) topology’ tshirt.

Given it’s the new mathematical craze of the year, I’d be remiss not to include some ways to get more aperiodic monotiles in your life – check out these amazing earrings by Rob Simmons; Jamie Gallagher’s fantastic aperiodic pride pin (which launched at the TMiP conference this year, but his shop is currently under a deluge of orders thanks to a celebrity wearing one of his pins on TV, so there might be a delay in shipping); or some of the lovely aperiodic tile products available from the Etsy shop for Qwirkshop, laser cutter to the (maths YouTube) stars.

And finally, also on Etsy, there’s the lovely Mathysphere who produce mathematical and sciencey cross-stitch patterns, including this incredible maths sampler.

If you’ve seen any good mathematical gifts this year, add them to the comments!