Double Maths First Thing: Issue 18

Double Maths First Thing is not quite mathematically relegated yet

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the love and joy in maths.

My personal maths highlight of the week was well-actually-ing a Guardian Knowledge article, which claims that Man City were mathematically unable to stay on top of the 1972 Football League immediately after their final game. HOWEVER, had remaining results gone their way — specifically, a 17-17 draw between Liverpool and Derby County, and a 2-0 defeat for Liverpool in the other match — it was absolutely possible for the title to go to Maine Road (at least mathematically).

Links

On with the show!

Last week had my new favourite paper; this week has my new favourite talk title: Why Quantum Cryptanalysis is Bollocks. It’s a good read, hitting almost — almost — Adam Atkinson levels of scorn.

Two PDFs to begin with? A strong start. And this one is over a kilopage — given that it’s an Infinite Napkin, though, that shows some restraint. It’s an overview of an awful lot of pure maths, the sort of thing I skipped lectures about back in the day, but now find quite interesting.

I enjoyed this story of how to represent numbers in a calculator.

Given last night’s destruction of the kids’ Monopoly dreams (only one of them ended up in tears, I’m not completely heartless), it’s not as though I need help defeating the children at card games. In case you do, though, here is a card game and strategy. See if you can make more children cry! (It strikes me that you could also use it as a terrible way to approximate pi.)

In less mean news, Sam has a new game, in which you talk about maths with just short words. It sounds like great fun!

Currently

I understand DMFT was mentioned in a recent MathsGear newsletter. I’m a fan of the enterprise, and as far as I can tell, all of the dice I have ever bought from them are perfectly random.

I’m hosting the Carnival of Mathematics for early March — follow that link if you’ve got any maths links you’d like to share. Or email me, I’m always happy to hear of things!

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