Double Maths First Thing: Issue 19

Double Maths First Thing got nerdsniped by the Parker Square

Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight in doing maths for its own sake.

For example, I coded up a trammel in Geogebra after seeing this video. It’s fun to play with the parameters.

Links

James Pae has come up with an excellent answer to “when am I ever going to use that in real life?” by performing a detailed study of whether it’s true that the closer the shop to the Paris Métro, the worse the kebab.

Since we’re lining up the triumphs of mathematics: apparently statistics have completely ruined basketball. Maybe NBA fans will slowly migrate to rugby instead.

Whimsy? Goodness me, no, all super serious (if surprising) today; for instance, I’ve just come across a paper by Sarah Hart about the maths of Moby-Dick. (Aside: I once tried to use Moby-Dick as a base text for estimating the probabilities of letter sequences in 19th-century English. I discovered that the most common 4-grams in use at the time were WHAL and HALE before realising I was going to need a bigger corpus.)

I remember spending a long coach journey to Belgium transfixed by the puzzle of making any number from 1, 2, 3, 4 and whatever operations I could justify. A variant on this, using four 2s, was spoiled by Paul Dirac — Eli Bendersky has the story.

A very pretty thing from Gerard Westendorp: the Complex Farey fraction tessellation. I haven’t read through the maths yet, but it’s cool whether I understand it or not.

Currently

I’m given to believe that there is a US$10,000 bounty for anyone who discovers a true Parker square in the next couple of years. I’m also given to believe that if a magic square of squares exists, its elements are on the order of at least quintillions; I suspect there are none. Proof by MattJam: if one existed, his followers would have found it by now.

By the time the next DMFT comes out, I’ll have hosted the Carnival of Mathematics at Flying Colours Maths — if you’ve got any last-minute submissions, you’ll need to get them in quickly. And if you have any interesting facts about the number 237, those would be super-helpful.

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