January

Just remembered something - at #BigMathsJam, who asked me about my droste Dobble set?

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Take your like and get out

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @KESMathematics

@KESMathematics HOW MANY YEARS AGO???

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Ed Pegg, Jr has started updating mathpuzzle.com again! Hooray!

8 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @sxpmaths

@sxpmaths Yeah, those are great!

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🧓 "That's a nice dress, (2-year-old)"

👶 "IT'S GOT POCKETS!!!"

#StartYoung

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I think this hyperbolic tiling I left in my last office might be ten years old!

6 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Andrew_Taylor

@Andrew_Taylor "I would've got away with HS2 if it wasn't for you pesky kids!"

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Oh no, I've written 'except' six times and it's now an unpronounceable mess of letters

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared do you know of a decent taxonomy of mathematical topics, covering as wide a range as possible but particularly secondary and HE? At the moment I'm using the mathcentre taxonomy (mathcentre.ac.uk/types/communit…) which is old and missing lots of things

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared I want a set of categories to describe what ideas a question assesses. The mathcentre taxonomy is a hierarchical thing with entries like "Numbers and Computation -> Arithmetic -> Operations -> Multiplication".
I don't think a hierarchy is correct, but (1/2)

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In reply to @christianp

@honeypisquared I want someone else to have thought about all the concepts involved in maths at the level I'm working in, and how they relate to each other, so I can have a standard way for question authors to say "this question is about factorising quadratics" without making up their own tags

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In reply to @Kit_Yates_Maths

@Kit_Yates_Maths @GermanQuatsch might get it?

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Is my daughter too young for NP-hard problems?

26 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @Simon_Gregg

@Simon_Gregg It's a poncey toiletries advent calendar

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In reply to @Simon_Gregg

@Simon_Gregg Oh, it's the twelve days of Christmas. That hadn't twigged in my head

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@ncllibsage 1906?

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In reply to @MouldS

@MouldS Maybe @colourblindorg?

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The phishing is coming from _inside_ the social network!

4 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @NewcastleUniUCU

@NewcastleUniUCU @UniofNewcastle Known knowns - that's knowledge squared

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I can't work out what WolframAlpha is doing wrong with this query: wolframalpha.com/input/?i=deriv…"derivative of (vector{1,2} dot vector{x,x^2}) with respect to x"

It can do the dot product properly on its own: wolframalpha.com/input/?i=vecto…

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In reply to @d_yellowlees

@d_yellowlees I hit deleted items 420 yesterday.

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Is anyone planning anything for the next palindrome day, 2020-02-02?

26 favourites 8 retweets

In reply to @letsgetmathing

@letsgetmathing I think that means it's a feast day for you

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared @AlxHague 70

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Yes!!! twitter.com/breenmij/statu…

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In reply to @MathsInspiratn

@MathsInspiratn @StatsJen @hughhunt @tomrocksmaths Will any of you have time for a drink?

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Recipe for instant mathematical delight: search MathWorld for the word "surprisingly"
mathworld.wolfram.com/search/?query=…

8 favourites 2 retweets

Is this @My_Metro stat misleading? Does "escalators were working" mean:
- every escalator was working
- every station had a working escalator
- every station had working escalators in both directions
- they measured time each escalator was running, and took the mean

10 favourites 5 retweets

In reply to @christianp

The first two options are straight out, because one of the escalators at Haymarket has been broken for weeks. And if it's the mean, should it be weighted by usage?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Smylers2

@Smylers2 That's the most pessimistic option, which I didn't even want to think about

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In reply to @tomrocksmaths

@tomrocksmaths @SamHartburn @StEdmundHall @UniofOxford Sounds fun!
Format feels familiar...

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In reply to @christianp

Uh oh.

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In reply to @christianp

It's 95% all the way down.

(95% of the way down)

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In reply to @christianp

Writing a follow-up to "How to Lie with Statistics", titled

"The Enormous Difficulty of Telling the Truth with Statistics"

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In reply to @RAnachro

@RAnachro Some people say 'percentage points' to make that distinction. E.g. if 20 if 100 people were ill and now it's 30, that's an increase of 100 percent or 10 percentage points

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In reply to @SamHartburn

@SamHartburn to make the graphic work. I don't have a problem with it

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Does *your* calculator give the numbers happy little emoji names?
Mine does.
somethingorotherwhatever.com/nice-calculator

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Dredging through @aperiodical's comment moderation backlog, I spotted this interesting app by @NathanFallet: delta-math-helper.com
Looks like it'd be useful if you have a few calculations that you need to over and over

4 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @Shona_Mu

@Shona_Mu Someone should tell the conference I spoke at, where I had to submit an actual 8-page paper to go with my talk. Not sure the paper was ever published anywhere

3 favourites 0 retweets

February

Cor golly, ten years today since I wrote my first maths blog post: checkmyworking.com/2010/02/whats-…
In the ten years since then, I've narrowed down my interests from "all maths" to "all maths except pregroups"

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @ben_nuttall

@ben_nuttall But Choco Liebniz is right there.

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In reply to @matheknitician

@matheknitician @WoollyBenguin My grandad was one of the first dialysis patients and held the record for longest time on dialysis. I'm glad someone donated theirs to keep you going

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @matheknitician

@matheknitician @WoollyBenguin No, London. Don't tell anyone, but I have Southern roots

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In reply to @JimPropp

@JimPropp Yes: I wrote a parser for asciimath syntax, and it has an open bug from someone who encountered just such an ambiguity. It involved normal parentheses too, somehow

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared "Playing With Infinity", written by Rózsa Péter while confined to a Jewish ghetto during the war, is as good a pop maths book as any.

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared @AlexandraBerke's Beautiful Symmetries is a worthy contribution to the genre beautifulsymmetry.onl

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In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans @TLMaths oh my god. Please say he got a computer to generate these

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Currently embroiled in an all-Chris email conversation. Have had to resort to using surnames to have any chance of knowing who we're talking about

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In reply to @christianp

#Diversity

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In reply to @stecks

@stecks @mscroggs @aPaulTaylor I know which way it was for my puzzles

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In reply to @KentHaines

@KentHaines Not sure I have something ready-made, but you could ask "does doing <operation> to both sides of an equation always/sometimes/never preserve the equation?"

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Maths modelling exercise: describe the shape of this pack of butter as it's used up

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In reply to @Daily_Epsilon

@GwoMaths @MathsTim What's a nickel worth, and what's a dime worth?
Yours,
Confused of Great Britain

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Presumptuously, Austin sat down before the dinner gong was sounded

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Alright:

Ever since his rambling speech, Mr Romney was intermittently asked "But why do you want to be buried under _that_ ward?"

0 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @FOTSN

@FOTSN are you telling me you haven't watched the Clangers with the subtitles on?

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In reply to @FOTSN

@FOTSN oh no, cooler heads have prevailed on series 3. What a bore!

Series 1 was like this:

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In reply to @becky_k_warren

@becky_k_warren @DavidKButlerUoA There's a really good French word for people like this: 'yakafokon' (just do... /you just have to...) fr.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yakafokon
V satisfying to shout when annoyed.
Mrs L-P has also banned "it should work" for similar reasons.

1 favourite 0 retweets

I'm not sure I've seen this puzzle before, and I really like it:

We have n keys and n boxes. Each key fits only one box. We shuffle the keys and put one in each box. Then we randomly break open 1≤k≤n boxes. What is the probability that we can unlock all the other boxes?

90 favourites 17 retweets

In reply to @christianp

I'm trying to see if I can turn this into an intuition-challenging result, like the birthday paradox.

"100 boxes, I open 99 of them, prob you can open the last one?" (really high, not surprising)

"100 boxes, I open 1, prob you can open all the rest?" (higher than you'd think?)

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In reply to @christianp

The birthday paradox works as a demo because you can engineer an astonishingly high probability from what looks like a small part of the probability space.

Maybe this is the one probability puzzle that *does* match our intuitions.

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In reply to @PetersenGraph

@PetersenGraph that's certainly true!

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In reply to @victorolosaurus

@victorolosaurus @stevenstrogatz A key can be in the box that it unlocks. If you're worried about that happens practically, maybe a box snaps locked when you push its lid down.

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I've been thinking about the fact that an n×n square grid has as many cells as a triangular lattice with n triangles on each side.
Is there a nice continuous bijection between them? When n is odd, you can at least keep one line of symmetry throughout.

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In reply to @christianp

Here's the same thing for a 2×2 grid. The triangle in the middle has to go one way or the other, so you have to break the vertical line of symmetry

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In reply to @christianp

I've made a nice looping thing!
triangle-square.glitch.me

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In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo open k boxes first

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In reply to @BarbaraFantechi

@BarbaraFantechi ah, like this!

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Pecnut

@Pecnut @stecks getting that on a t-shirt post-haste

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In reply to @SamDurbin1

@SamDurbin1 @stecks Conversely, I maintain there's no way to get a gang of unruly year 10s on board like a rude-sounding name and a rude-looking diagram.

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In reply to @BarbaraFantechi

@BarbaraFantechi currently negotiating getting some time set aside at work to do arty stuff, so: soon!

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In reply to @MathsInspiratn

@MathsInspiratn That'd be lovely. Would you like different colours, or a black background?

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In reply to @mrtheta33

@mrtheta33 Yes

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway or, since months are cyclical, shift everything right by three months. That's easier to visualise

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In reply to @ZoeLGriffiths

@ZoeLGriffiths @robeastaway I was surprised Feb 29th was higher than those. You'd expect four times as many on the 28th as the 29th, but apparently not!

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway @ZoeLGriffiths ah!

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In reply to @christianp

Thanks to tips from a couple of people, I've done some more work on what I'm calling the squiangle.

8 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @SamHartburn @Trianglemancsd random-people.glitch.me

3 favourites 1 retweet

Oh, to have the confidence of a man explaining prime-finding algorithms to Simon Plouffe

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In reply to @SamHartburn

@SamHartburn @icecolbeveridge Absolutely!

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In reply to @SamHartburn

@SamHartburn Yep, that's right. And tell me, because I could use data from other countries!

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New #MathArt on display in @NCLMathsStats. Based on my 'squiangle' triangle → square transformation.
This piece shows the sequence of moves triangle → square → 90° rotation → triangle → 120° rotation

20 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

@NCLMathsStats You can see that transformation in motion at squiangle.glitch.me

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In reply to @Ayliean

@Ayliean @NCLMathsStats Hmmm! 🤔

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Were you expecting this?

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This is an incredible integer sequence: oeis.org/A000201

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In reply to @roger_mansuy

@roger_mansuy the Jessica Stockholder sculpture at IHES is what inspired me to find that sequence :)

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In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston @theoremoftheday I got to it via the "if n is in the sequence then n+(rank of n) is not in the sequence" definition. I was very surprised to find the fibonacci word!

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @OpenLab_Ncl

@OpenLab_Ncl do you know if there are any laser cutters on campus that I (a staff member) could use?

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron *gasps in Northern*

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I know what I'm doing this morning oeis.org/A093579

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I am not a lecturer. I am on strike. I'm on strike both for my own pension, and for others who have it worse than me, due to insecure employment or inequitable opportunity. twitter.com/pipmcgowan/sta…

9 favourites 3 retweets

This is your semi-regular reminder that the thaMographe exists, is easy to use, and less hassle to keep in your bag than a set of compasses, protractor and ruler. twitter.com/thamographe/st…

9 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson A glitch in the matrix

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Nominative determinism and Tyson Fury:

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In reply to @NewcastleUniUCU

@NewcastleUniUCU @Athena_SWAN My favourite thing about the uni's EDI events is how many of them are outside core hours...

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My daughter calls 10 'one-zero' and, honestly, she's got a point

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In reply to @acubley

@acubley A perfectly cromulent number

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@mikegibson2010 I think I'd go 'f twice'

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In reply to @rooneyvision

@rooneyvision @thetrainline Is it bad that I recognise the film that's from?

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In reply to @rooneyvision

@rooneyvision @thetrainline this one from 1948, about UCLA's mechanical computer vimeo.com/70589461

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared Happy bday!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @haggismaths

@haggismaths @stecks @peterrowlett @aperiodical @NewtonInstitute Peanocast: each episode is about the previous episode

4 favourites 0 retweets

Best use of the Bercow gif, 2020 twitter.com/EnDirectDuLabo…

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @blatherwick_sam

@blatherwick_sam I'd never been bothered before about whether 100 had to be a square number

1 favourite 0 retweets

I'm a big fan of whatever this is mateturismo.wordpress.com/2020/01/30/cha…

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When we say 'time is a dimension', this is what that means. twitter.com/JanWillemTulp/…

13 favourites 4 retweets

In reply to @RrrichardZach

@RrrichardZach I had to look at the source of kpathsea recently, and I just shook my head and closed the editor

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In reply to @SLSingh

@SLSingh a similar site in English is numdic.com

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As the song goes:

🎶 Blue and yellow and that is all,
Yellow and blue and that's it.
I can see both colours
Of the rainbow,
There are only two. 🎶 twitter.com/DrJeniMillard/…

4 favourites 1 retweet

March

In reply to @christianp

My first thought, 'Sleuth Women', was stronger, but I'd have had to recuse myself

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I need you all to know that our team name at the murder mystery yesterday was "We've got a Maigraine" and I think the organiser thought I'd just misspelt 'migraine'.
Anyway, the prize for best name went to 'Giggle girls', so it was clearly a fix.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @AnonMathMom

@AnonMathMom We've had the same - noticed all four molars last night. After the nightmare of the other teeth, this feels like an anticlimax

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @MathsTechnology

@MathsTechnology @TMiPUK @MathsWorldUK Up north *would* be good!

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Not sure how I feel about this.

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In reply to @christianp

Or this.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @GhostMutt

@GhostMutt In JavaScript, render each frame to a png file using the node 'canvas' module, then use ffmpeg to make them into a movie.
The code is online at github.com/christianp/ani…

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In reply to @christianp

Slightly favourable about this

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

Whoosh!

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @yenergy

@yenergy Have you seen Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries? Extremely low-peril and camp detective drama

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Kaboing

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A day's break in the strike has allowed @Tegglington to open-source Coursebuilder, the tool we made to produce accessible web-based versions of lecture notes.
github.com/coursebuilder-…
It takes in LaTeX, and outputs HTML pages and slideshows.

10 favourites 4 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@Tegglington There's a load of related stuff around automatically building notes and providing access to them through the VLE, which we'll also open source later, but we thought it was important to get the main part of the tool out, for those who can use it.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Triangular!

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Inspired by the recent fuss about who Michael Bloomberg could give $1 million to, I've made a thing on @glitch which asks for your net worth then tells you where in the USA you could give everyone $1 million (or $1, or $100, or ...)
make-it-rain-bloomberg.glitch.me

53 favourites 18 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@glitch I've written a bit about it on @aperiodical: aperiodical.com/2020/03/where-…

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @anildash

@anildash @glitch Oh yes, good point! Will do.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@anildash @glitch Although what that would look like on phones needs some thought

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In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo @neil_calkin Colin, the only conclusion that makes any sense is that you wronged a computer at some point in the past and it put a hex on you

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In reply to @alexandersafir

@alexandersafir @anildash @glitch They are

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @joelbezaire

@joelbezaire @mathhombre It looks like part of the way towards peasant multiplication: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_E…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA Wikipedia says 9 is an 'absorbing element' en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorbing…
But I'd always call it a 'zero element'.

6 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA But ZERO IS SO COOL

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@DavidKButlerUoA Just spotted I wrote 9 instead of 0 🙄

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA What do we call the coolest thing possible? ABSOLUTE ZERO. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, CP out

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @lyd_w

@lyd_w How is it only day 10?! I've forgotten what my job is

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In reply to @lyd_w

@lyd_w

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @UncannyStatic

@uncanny_static I camel-case the title. I don't do a lot of scholarly writing, so this scheme might not be tenable for anyone else

1 favourite 0 retweets

Well done to whoever on the @NewcastleUniUCU #UCUStrike made this placard!

24 favourites 3 retweets

How does Richard K. Guy not have a MacTutor biography?!

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@mikegibson2010 @oganikathegames Did I see an early version of this a year or two ago? It feels familiar

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In reply to @CardColm

@CardColm John Conway has one.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @RobJLow

@RobJLow @ColinTheMathmo Yeah, I can't think many English mathematicians of the 19th century had PhDs

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In reply to @christianp

Clonk

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In reply to @christianp

Ah! That's how you do it!

4 favourites 0 retweets

Who called it a magma and not a hemidemisemigroup?

6 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @siwelwerd

@siwelwerd @katemath @impredicativity @maryepilgrim @Oreo You have not lived.

1 favourite 0 retweets

Colleague sending follow-up emails to ask why I haven't responded, as if he's completely unaware of the #UCUStrike 🤷‍♂️

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Kerchonk

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I've made a t-shirt out of my squiangle design. Here's what it looks like on algorithmically-generated hunk Chad McYank redbubble.com/shop/p/4574510…

6 favourites 1 retweet

I've just found out there's an episode of Postman Pat about change-ringing bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows…

5 favourites 1 retweet

2020 and the Cambridge journals website still has the link to read the PDF behind an obscure icon next to the sharing links.

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared *consults Cluedo board*

I'll be in the... ballroom

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(quietly assuming that the people who keep the server farms running are still going in to work)

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett I am so ready to talk with your son about this kind of algebra!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett Yeess, yeeeesss, feel the call of the dark arithmetic!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK I mean, it'll put people off knocking on your door, so in a way, yes

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There is a Microsoft Teams app for Linux. What a crazy world.

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The person doing the Abel prize announcement appears to have chosen as his green screen background "unregulated hotel room"

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I want as many different conventions for writing numbers as you can give me. I'm interested in contexts where there are different rules for how numbers are written, e.g. scientific notation, percentages, currencies.
I'm also interested in 'optional' things like grouping digits

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Which numbers can you represent with different notations? For example, decimals represent numbers of the form a×10ᵇ, so not even all of ℚ!
What fruity sets can we find a corresponding notation for?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @semiBad

@semiBad that's a brilliantly lateral way of finding some! I've looked at the source code for a few internationalisation formatters though, so cut out the middleman

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

I've seen gas stations in the US show the tenths part with a fraction instead of a decimal.
Have you seen any other signage with a fixed denominator that isn't 10?

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

Or, more thrillingly, are there contexts where numbers are written as decimals, but some decimals are illegal?
This is sometimes true for currencies: a price like £1.054 would normally be rounded to the nearest penny. But if it's a price per unit, you might need that extra digit

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @LearningMaths

@LearningMaths that's exactly what I'm looking for! Thanks!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @miclugo

@miclugo that rings a faint bell! Thanks!

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In reply to @UD_engr88

@UD_engr88 thanks! Do you know roughly when it changed?

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA @LearningMaths ahh, I knew I'd seen that kind of thing recently! Thanks

1 favourite 0 retweets

I've just seen that @mickaellaunay is doing daily fun maths livestreams: youtube.com/watch?v=J6tcnc…

Is anyone doing something similar in English?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @boss_maths

@boss_maths @UD_engr88 yess, this is the kind of knowledge I need!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Percentages highlight an often-ignored point about rounding: if you've got a boundary, rounding to it can be very misleading.
For example, if something works 999 of 1000 times, it's not correct to say it's 100% effective. 99% is further from the true value, but shows the failure.

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @jonpenguin

@jonpenguin oh, that's new to me. Thanks!

1 favourite 0 retweets

@oscarwlog Yes, that's a good vein of odd notation. Have you seen fractional numbers in hex or octal notation? I've definitely seen binary fractions, but can't think where I might have seen a fractional hex value

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @CPANJGamble

@CPANJGamble ... how did that help?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @poveryant

@poveryant As in 3,300? That's new to me, thanks

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In reply to @EmJayLambert

@EmJayLambert @icecolbeveridge That intrigued me greatly, but this page - metricviews.org.uk/2012/05/fire-h… - says the top number is the size of the mains, and the bottom is the distance to it, so it's just a scalar

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @TeaKayB @samholloway @theclairodactyl @SamHartburn

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @bbarber_

@bbarber_ Could you do it online?

3 favourites 0 retweets

Slowly becoming more and more annoyed that the android and web-based versions of @msonenote don't have the "insert space" tool.

1 favourite 0 retweets

#WorkingFromHome

#NoPlagueToday

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @algorithmachine

@algorithmachine @katemath @AndrewR_Physics @pa28 @ChrisMihos 85 is unimaginably hot to me. I'm on your kids' side

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @dennisprangle

@dennisprangle Are you in the MSP online teaching group on Teams? We've been looking into that

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math @_jcken @stecks It's very good for self-service formative use, and doesn't need anything installed to use. We're doing all sorts to support online teaching here, but early next week I should have a simple LTI solution which doesn't need installation but allows reporting score back to your VLE

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In reply to @christianp

@k_houston_math @_jcken @stecks VLEs with built in SCORM players such as Moodle and Blackboard (but BB is full of bugs) can also put scores from Numbas directly into their grade books without any software setup.

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In reply to @christianp

@k_houston_math @_jcken @stecks On the subject of exams: we're still thinking this through ourselves. Exams could happen in Numbas, but because everything has to be auto-marked, you're a bit limited in what you can ask. Randomisation reduces the efficiency of copying answers, though.

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In reply to @christianp

@k_houston_math @_jcken @stecks You can set questions creatively to test student understanding of concepts, but you can't ask for a proof. So, good for things like service courses and applied subjects, but less so for pure maths

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In reply to @christianp

@k_houston_math @_jcken @stecks One feature of Numbas' design will come in very handy: it runs entirely on the client, so not affected by poor Internet connections when submitting answers or rendering maths.

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math @_jcken @stecks No problem, go ahead!

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In reply to @poveryant

@poveryant So the games like NBA 2K3 conflict with that

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared @asharpeducator And here's me with my own stupid name as a username!

1 favourite 0 retweets

@BiCapitalize Would you say you are rouxful?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math I'm not sure that's the kind of thing we'd ever be allowed to share. Might get away with a question from a mock, when they exist

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In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo PeerTube?

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Tech support email: "We encountered many errors while following the instructions published at <address>. Do you have a version without errors?"

Just.... what.

1 favourite 0 retweets

What forethought of @peterrowlett and @stecks to round up and interview the makers of every maths podcast going, just before we all got locked down. twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @statto

@statto I've been meaning to ask if network theory can tell me either:
- how many of the people I know should I expect to be infected, or
- given how many people I know are infected, can I estimate the population infection rate?

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Not since GDPR day have I been made aware of so many mailing lists that I didn't ask to be on.
No, hotel I went to 9 years ago for afternoon tea, I don't want to know what you're doing about coronavirus.

13 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @BassMonkey_

@BassMonkey_ @glitch @standupmaths I think that might be @glitch doing some maintenance. Surely even Matt can't send enough traffic to cause them trouble?

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@BassMonkey_ @glitch @standupmaths ah, the status page says they're deploying a fix: status.glitch.com

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In reply to @GhostMutt

@GhostMutt More tins of veg means either 2 or 3 veg.
Prob(3 veg) is easy, because there's only one way of doing it: 5/9 * 4/8 * 3/7.
Prob(2 veg) is a bit harder: either VVT, VTV, or TVV. So 3*(5/9 * 4/8 * 3/7)
Add those together to get total prob

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In reply to @christianp

@GhostMutt You could work out the probs for VVT, VTV, and TVV separately, but it works out the same (try proving that!)

PS: what system is that?

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In reply to @GhostMutt

@GhostMutt A rule of thumb is: if you write more than a page of working for one calculation, consider looking for a one-liner

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Liven up lock-down: it's not social distancing, it's Covid Ops.

Sneak in and out of the park without being seen by another soul. Erase all trace of your activities with thorough hand-washing.

9 favourites 2 retweets

I promise I didn't plan this

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Is it 'lockdown' or 'lock-down'?

3 favourites 0 retweets

A few years ago, we paid a web developer to make a website for us. The HTML uses single quotes for attributes, and is double-spaced throughout - there are two linebreaks after every line of code!

Just why.

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @wordsandbuttons

@wordsandbuttons what's TFS?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson sed would fix it for me. It just boggles me that anyone would write code that way

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @pimbellinga

@pimbellinga What do you do if a student can't explain their work? Write off the whole test?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared Very erudite.

Verudite.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @pimbellinga

@pimbellinga If you're only checking a sample of students, and one or some of them fail your check, you have to assume some unchecked students also cheated, so punish the whole class. I can't imagine students will think that's fair

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Youngest L-P has pointed out that the Indonesian part of New Guinea looks like a dinosaur.

6 favourites 1 retweet

Everything about building mobile apps makes me cross.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @aperfect

@aperfect I'm doing everything. We might need to make an app to deliver to all our students

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @aperfect

@aperfect "just build a web app" is the part I can't do. I just need to load a particular URL in a web view

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April

Nice to have this tested in the real world: a student doing a @NclNumbas test lost internet connection halfway through the test. Fortunately, all data is duplicated in local storage, so later that evening they re-entered the test and all the data was saved back to the DB. Phew!

5 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @AdrianJannetta

@AdrianJannetta @NclNumbas No, it was a CBA that they had all week to complete

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @jamesgrime

@jamesgrime @stecks I was about to say #spoilers, but if the spoiler raises more questions than it answers, is it a spoiler?

3 favourites 0 retweets

The toddler has started using the words 'maybe' and 'probably'. Time to inoculate her against frequentist interpretation.

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Real-world analysis: for any ε>0, there is a dog δ such that δ's whiskers are within ε of my toast.

12 favourites 5 retweets

Rats, that's another space on the lock down bingo card crossed off. 🍞

7 favourites 0 retweets

Finally got a quiet moment to record a #BigMathOff pitch.
Big fan of whatever this is that my face has decided to do

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @letsgetmathing

@letsgetmathing My bro was delivered 3kg of bread flour as a substitution for something else he wanted, so he gave it to me. I'd be in trouble otherwise!

1 favourite 0 retweets

Now up to 7 #BigMathOff pitches. Nearly time to start!

6 favourites 3 retweets

An interesting example of Brouwer's fixed point theorem: I think the tummy button of the snowman on the girl's PJs lines up with her own tummy button.

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

I now realise that I've added another exponential growth problem to my life.
Fortunately, I've already got a mathematical model for this one aperiodical.com/2012/05/grow-y…

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My wife is a primary teacher and while her school don't use quite as many services as this, it's still too many passwords to remember.
I wonder why LTI hasn't taken off in primary like it has in higher ed. twitter.com/dibsonmuad/sta…

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Just fitted a new aerator to the tap on the bathroom sink. Now in full control of flow rate. Feel like Handy Andy crossed with a Pharaoh*.

[*] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic…

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared stretcher for a subbuteo player

1 favourite 0 retweets

Print your own dobble!!
print-and-play.asmodee.fun

7 favourites 4 retweets

In reply to @AnonMathMom

@AnonMathMom At least you got to watch different episodes. We've been watching the same episode of Bing since February

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @RrrichardZach

@RrrichardZach @Brightspace @CanvasLms QTI is the standard format for representing quiz questions. Apparently D2L's export is in QTI format: community.brightspace.com/s/question/0D5…

2 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @tim_hunt

@tim_hunt @RrrichardZach @Brightspace @CanvasLms well yes, but for copying MCQs between systems it does the job, doesn't it?

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In reply to @christianp

@tim_hunt @RrrichardZach @Brightspace @CanvasLms though having spotted your post on the moodle forum, I see now that D2L adds a load of unhelpful rubbish. Oh well!

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I've just discovered that if you paste markdown into WordPress it converts it to HTML for you. That's nice!

4 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

this is like the time I discovered that Jabubul automatically refronds TRV receipts from PlasNost

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @tim_hunt

@tim_hunt @RrrichardZach @Brightspace @CanvasLms yeah, I assumed D2L would at have a common cartridge export, but it seems not

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Uh oh twitter.com/mscroggs/statu…

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @evelynjlamb

@evelynjlamb Have you been doing the rainbows thing?

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In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs @matheknitician @aperiodical that makes me feel *slightly* better

1 favourite 0 retweets

Everything in the L-P household is decided democratically. Starting to think the toddler is gaming the system. I don't recognise these voters but she's on first name terms with all of them.

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In reply to @christianp

youtu.be/qYlWjxs3BSQ

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Back on my animations nonsense.
The toddler came to look:

"You doing maths, daddy?"
"I like that maths!
"How is that maths?"

208 favourites 37 retweets

Welcome to my webinar on interpreting graphs of exponential functions, "Beware the Log"

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Just worked out the punchline!

17 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @click_arun

@click_arun node.js with the 'canvas' package to render frames, then ffmpeg to turn them into a video. Source code at github.com/christianp/ani…

8 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @natluurtsema

@natluurtsema morphology? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpholog…

1 favourite 0 retweets

Have just realised that @jamestanton's exploding dots is the same thing as Papy's minicomputer.
Now excitedly awaiting his treatment of Papy's "Groups" youtube.com/watch?v=RnLOmc…

6 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @jamestanton

@jamestanton Have you seen this? rkennes.be/Papy-Minicompu…

It maps pretty well on to a lot of the 2→1 exploding dots stuff.

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @PaulsPrattle

@PaulsPrattle @jamestanton The same

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @GhostMutt

@GhostMutt did anybody *not*?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @matthen2

@matthen2 did you see Stephen Wittens' version, back in the day? acko.net/blog/how-to-fo…
Yours is easier to follow, I think

71 favourites 14 retweets

Five minutes back and forth with @overleaf claiming it's never heard of \mathbb until I realised I hadn't done \usepackage{amsmath}

13 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @overleaf

@overleaf could the help message "if it's part of a package, make sure you've included it" recommend the package to use for widely-used macros like this?

1 favourite 0 retweets

The Baby Buddy app from @BestBeginnings is really good. Each week it gives a rough size for the foetus along with a similarly-sized object to help you visualise it.

(and also a creepy drawing of the foetus which you shouldn't look at while eating)

(1/2)

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In reply to @christianp

Unfortunately, 'size' seems to mean 'length', with no consideration of volume or eccentricity.

So, in the last few weeks, L-P mk2 has been:

A tea bag 😊
A bar of soap 😐
A tin of beans 🥴
A CD 😬
A pen 😅

I don't think anyone would say those are in increasing size order.

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Quiz: the doctor has found a stray object in your fundament.
Pick the one you really don't want it to be:

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In reply to @Helenintgarden

@Helenintgarden @aperiodical @james_a_9283 @K_Severn The poll plugin seems to be erratic about who it allows to vote. The buttons are there for me, and for the 14 people who have voted so far

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @ben_nuttall

@ben_nuttall that might just be you. For me it says 12:xx

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In reply to @ben_nuttall

@ben_nuttall it's 12:xx on WhatsApp web for me too. I wonder if it's a localisation thing

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Couldn't do anything else, so made a wobbly clock

3284 favourites 409 retweets

In reply to @glitch

@glitch what does ""Project <project-name> suspended: Suspending for too many remixes - contact support" mean? I wanted to choose a project name, and it turns out someone else already has it, but viewing their project gives that message

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

I've made it into a full, real-time clock: wobble-clock.glitch.me

107 favourites 25 retweets

In reply to @christianp

yesssss

240 favourites 41 retweets

In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans @yppahpeek 12:00 is going to be good

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@kyledevans @yppahpeek phwoarrrrr

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The good thing about the way that Linux works is that asking JS to allocate a list with 5^100 elements in Firefox has crashed my entire system.

5 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @KangarooPhysics

@KangarooPhysics nice!

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @dj__error

@dj__error Javascript

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @ben_nuttall

@ben_nuttall @pickover That's-a me!

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @DanDin01665436

@DanDin01665436 @dj__error github.com/christianp/ani…

4 favourites 1 retweet

This reminds me of every meeting I've ever been in where we propose changing to a drastically improved process twitter.com/howie_hua/stat…

6 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @mikeydoubled

@mikeydoubled @round Thanks for making me feel bad!

6 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @sharpestthought

@sharpestthought I reckon you could cheat with electromagnets to hold the end in place

1 favourite 0 retweets

I tried the #BigMathOff and I'm up against the editor of Math Horizons! @TedG has pitched a really good bit of number theory that I'm not sure if I've seen before.
I had fun trying to record a video about fusible numbers. twitter.com/TedG/status/12…

6 favourites 1 retweet

The first week of the #BigMathOff lock-down edition is almost done and we've still got enough material for at least a couple more.
Thanks to the players so far, @mathspace, @matheknitician, @kyledevans, @samjshah2, @james_a_9283, @K_Severn and @TedG, and the players yet to come!

11 favourites 3 retweets

In reply to @christianp

And thanks to @james_a_9283, @SamHartburn, @mathforge and @stecks for helping with the admin, because I've just realised I haven't acknowledged them for that yet! The #BigMathOff wouldn't happen without them

7 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @mathforge

@mathforge @james_a_9283 @SamHartburn @stecks I meant you!

1 favourite 0 retweets

*opens BSL dictionary app*
"ooh, videos, better make sure my sound's turned off"

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Going to try this today twitter.com/c0mplexnumber/…

5 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @matthras

@matthras @futurebird @TChihMath Give @NclNumbas a go - it can create printed worksheets as well as the usual interactive quizzes. If you really want it to be a markup language instead of using the graphical editor, you could always write the question files by hand

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

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In reply to @Kit_Yates_Maths

@Kit_Yates_Maths The pessimist's view could be that this rule won't work as a deterrent for people who don't understand exponential growth

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @drvinceknight

@drvinceknight I just... use git?

3 favourites 0 retweets

If anyone felt like making an anonymous #BigMathOff pitch, that would help me out...

2 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math @C_J_Smith Once online exam hell is over, I want to have a look at making coursebuilder easier to use

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @statto

@statto As they say, you're always preventing the last pandemic

1 favourite 0 retweets

Solipsists: what if nothing exists?

Mathematicians: what if nothing DOESN'T exist? twitter.com/wtgowers/statu…

7 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett the two-year-old version of this is that things in the gardens have numbers, and we take turns shouting "run to 3!", "run to 1!" and so on. Recently she introduced number 7, which turned out to be "behind the little tikes car"

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett I think so. I haven't pushed her to derive an incompleteness/inconsistency result

1 favourite 0 retweets

The expression " 2^x / x^2 " is a palindrome when written in that syntax, but has a sort of rotational symmetry when laid out as a vertical fraction.

23 favourites 7 retweets

In reply to @mikeandallie

@mikeandallie @MrHonner I haven't seen a counterexample to that, yet

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @SciencePundit

@SciencePundit @evelynjlamb Or, I flippantly considered drawing the 2 with an 8-segment display.

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@SciencePundit @evelynjlamb Wait, I mean 7-segment

1 favourite 0 retweets

Just used @overleaf 's "compare versions" tool to see what changes my collaborator made, or rather didn't make, last night.
A++ would recommend (Overleaf, not the collaborator)

5 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @sangwinc

@sangwinc @ColinTheMathmo Loogabarrooga!

2 favourites 0 retweets

Just accidentally discovered that Ctrl+Shift+X switches the direction of text in a text area in Firefox. That was a very confusing 30 seconds!

7 favourites 0 retweets

I was jealous of how much fun the toddler was having with her Memory game, so I made my own. It's absolutely huge. absolutely-huge-memory.glitch.me

7 favourites 0 retweets

May

In reply to @Thalesdisciple

@Thalesdisciple @hannahnpbowman Mine's the same age as yours. Yesterday she made potions using water with food colouring in it and blossom petals, then she painted the nails on some hands drawn on cardboard. Today we're going to bake some cakes and then try connect the dots with chalk

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs

1 favourite 0 retweets

I couldn't possibly comment on any large donations I might recently have made

3 favourites 1 retweet

springerlink.com is giving a rather cool 404 message for every page at the moment. I'll take this as a sign that I shouldn't be doing maths

2 favourites 0 retweets

The @CBeebiesHQ programme DipDap just showed a monster dividing a cake into five pieces with two cuts. Is this what I pay my TV licence for?!

7 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

Mrs L-P immediately pointed out that if the cuts aren't straight lines there's no problem. I retract my complaint.

16 favourites 0 retweets

I thought more people would be interested in my absolutely huge memory game (absolutely-huge-memory.glitch.me).
It wasn't straightforward to implement; here's a little explanation of how it works

11 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @christianp

tfw you make something that appeals to exactly your brand of autism

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue I made a hyperbolic version a while ago. It's impossible.

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue Yeah, but 'small' has to be a very small number. If the view auto pans to whichever tile you pick, it could be as small as three tiles and it'd be very easy to get disoriented

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @josstified

@josstified Autodesk Sketchbook's time-lapse feature

1 favourite 0 retweets

The #BigMathOff submission queue is running low, but I've just prepared two pitches. If I pit myself against myself, I'm guaranteed to win.

Am I that much of a chicken?

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge so you're saying you're up for a best-of-three Beveridge v L-P grudge match?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @anildash

@anildash @glitch Writing the numbers in "base emoji" is on my to-do list!

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @alephJamesA

@alephJamesA Not sure what non-academic means, but if it's maths I'll take it

0 favourites 0 retweets

This is a good thread twitter.com/blatherwick_sa…

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Would you just look at that crumb though!
#SourdoughGoals #SourGoals

7 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @benjamin_leis

@benjamin_leis Cor!

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Today's JavaScript headache: Math.pow(Math.E,0.9) is more precise, but less accurate than, Math.exp(0.9).

3 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @lisyarus

@lisyarus More precise: more digits given.
Less accurate: those digits are incorrect

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @lisyarus

@lisyarus that's precisely what I'm doing.

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In reply to @lisyarus

@lisyarus I don't know why you're being so pedantic. I said 'more digits given'. Who are you? Do you just scan twitter for people tweeting about javascript?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Cshearer41

@Cshearer41 @ajk_44 @anniek_p @becky_k_warren Thank you all for sharing this! I hadn't fully articulated it before, but now I think maybe "know when to go away and calm down" should be one of the steps in any problem-solving guide.

9 favourites 3 retweets

In reply to @Robotbeat

@Robotbeat @aperiodical She was the first woman, and the first Iranian, to win the Fields medal, one of the top prizes in maths. Her work was mainly in geometry.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @mathzorro

@mathzorro intrigued to know how much brute-forcing you did to find those

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @PeterKagey

@PeterKagey Thanks!

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Yesterday I could count on one hand the people who thought my waffle about weird maths made them go 'aha!'. Now I need to use my feet too. Vote for @pogonomaths' much more interesting pitch in the #BigMathOff twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @eqdynamics

@eqdynamics @EFF Dad it's Wednesday

2 favourites 0 retweets

hey @wordpressdotcom, your "this address doesn't exist" page returns HTTP code 200. Could it return something like 404 instead? For example: wordpress.com/typo/?subdomai…

0 favourites 0 retweets

tfw a pure mathematician tries to write a motivational message

5 favourites 1 retweet

Just over an hour left to vote for @pogonomaths and finger counting aperiodical.com/2020/05/the-bi…

1 favourite 1 retweet

As a person whose job is to make e-assessment software, I'm greatly enjoying the /r/PearsonDesign subreddit as a catalogue of things to avoid. I live in fear of @NclNumbas showing up.
Point: auto-marking maths is hard.
But: please at least make an effort!
reddit.com/r/PearsonDesign

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @profRoys

@profRoys Everybody catching coronavirus while celebrating the war would be Peak 2020 Britain.

2 favourites 0 retweets

You, a coward: Python doesn't have a switch statement

Me, a modern-day Galileo:

12 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

of course, this has been done before: code.activestate.com/recipes/410695…

2 favourites 0 retweets

Tired: this is baby X Æ A-12

Wired: I have chosen a truly marvellous name for the baby, which this margin is too narrow to contain

10 favourites 1 retweet

Spent too long making this

46 favourites 3 retweets

Today's #BigMathOff pitch by @icecolbeveridge is unexpectedly relevant: are the possibilities *really* endless, bargain bin toy box? twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @SamHartburn

@SamHartburn @icecolbeveridge 'The possibilities are finite, modulo your child's imagination!"

1 favourite 0 retweets

Google Maps has sent me my "April timeline update".
#BigData

5 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @Krzysztof_Syruc

@Krzysztof_Syruc Fewer

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @mscroggs @matheknitician Outrageous

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs @peterrowlett @matheknitician Do it quickly, I've only got another couple of days' worth of pitches

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs @peterrowlett @matheknitician I want it on my desk by 2!

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway I think this is the motivation: if you give a precise number, you're still thinking of each death individually. If you round off, each death is just part of a statistic. Rounding implies somebody being forgotten, and those in charge caring less.

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway Absolutely

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I see the Nonsense Formula Disapprove-o-Matic 3000 is beeping wildly from the cupboard I left it in, but I have a personal policy of not giving air time to fascists

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett looks like you're walking this one!

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Drivin' round town
Painting things brown
It's Hugh Laurie
In his hue lorry

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You: movies such as "if..." exaggerate the violence of the British upper class as a metaphor for the class system

This public school's website: what's a metaphor?

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In reply to @christianp

legitimately thinking of putting this on a babygro for the new arrival

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In reply to @SamHartburn

@SamHartburn @peterrowlett @theclairodactyl My plan is to occasionally log in to accept swap requests

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Thinking about how every organisation had a "2020 vision" document, none of which envisioned a pandemic precipitating an almost total shutdown of society

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In reply to @mathforge

@mathforge Python's itertools.permutations has a lovely algorithm for generating tours of every permutation like this. If you haven't seen it, there's an explanation on stackoverflow: stackoverflow.com/questions/2565…

3 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @mathforge

@mathforge @Cshearer41 @RobJLow bah, I'd been saving that up to do next time I get some free time!
Why did you think it might not be possible?

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @benorlin

@benorlin Straight to the top of the class, Orlin

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In reply to @christianp

@benorlin On a related note, a scene from my market stall:

Me: "quality shapes for sale!"
Them: "enneagon?"
Me: "no, I've still got plenty of stock!"

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Uh oh incident-counter.glitch.me/nerdsniping

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The #BigMathOff has been running for a whole month! Thanks to everyone who's submitted so far.
There aren't many pitches left in the queue, so it might end this weekend, unless somebody sends more in.
Could *you* be somebody?

7 favourites 4 retweets

Serendipity! I'll be talking about this and other interactive maths things I've made in today's @TMiPUK event, at 3pm BST: talkingmathsinpublic.uk/#tmil twitter.com/SWCHS_Maths/st…

4 favourites 0 retweets

Mrs L-P is trying to upload a video to @Seesaw for her class. The browser keeps crashing on the caption page, when you first see the video. Surely it's not trying to transcode the video in the browser?!

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In reply to @Seesaw

@Seesaw Tried both chrome and Firefox, and another laptop. No other seesaw tabs open

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In reply to @SamHartburn

@SamHartburn @nicole_cozens @robeastaway @mrsdenyer That is incredible. Had you been to Slough before then? Did you spend all four days in the hotel or did you venture out to the trading estate? A romantic tour of the pedigree chum factory?

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To C, who sent me a postcard about the #BigMathOff: what a lovely thing to do! Thank you!

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett Thanks, @sioroberts!

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @mscroggs @FennekLyra @matheknitician @MarHarStar @soupie66 @DrSmokyFurby @MsGreenMaths @SamHartburn @karenshancock @theclairodactyl @Dragon_Dodo @Helenintgarden @notonlyahatrack @LizWindxor I have no idea what's going on. This is starting to feel similar to how Mork and Mindy was a spin off of Happy Days

5 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @SophieBays

@SophieBays I didn't know about world baking day, but I'm going to try to turn this into pizzas

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron I set up a personal Funkwhale instance a couple of weeks ago. It's a very good Google music replacement, but needs turbo nerd powers to set up

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge You nerdsniped me into looking at min/max bounds for the uncertainties in all the measurements. Even my lower bound is still over 60, so you're probably right

3 favourites 1 retweet

TALMO: Baltic trading port or surprisingly-memorable workshop acronym?

Answer: talmo.uk

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In reply to @christianp

someone should do a "Baltic city, IKEA furniture, or academic meeting?" quiz

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In reply to @eqdynamics

@eqdynamics Of course

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In reply to @JimPropp

@JimPropp You mean two tilings with the same symmetry group? Do you have to preserve the symmetry during the morph?

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In reply to @matheknitician

@matheknitician I wouldn't say "desparate"...

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In reply to @matheknitician

@matheknitician if there was massive demand, but I'm happy with 21 matches

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett He might enjoy thinking about muddy children: phiwumbda.org/~jesse/slides/…

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In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue Are you aware of unicodeit.net?

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In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue ah, sorry! I scanned the readme. As you were..

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In reply to @KarenCampe

@KarenCampe Last time I looked there were another two pitches, so you've got a couple more days at least

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This is how pros do US to metric conversions: measure a liquid by weight, add a digit of precision, and shift the decimal point to end up incorrect by a factor of 10.
Glad I stopped to think if that measurement sounded reasonable!

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @RealityMinus3

@RealityMinus3 Oh yes, they made that error too!

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In reply to @heavymetalmaths

@heavymetalmaths @Mathgarden Infinitely many! news.liverpool.ac.uk/2016/01/12/mat…

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Catching up on my reading, here's a post from Turismo Matemático relevant to @pogonomaths's #BigMathOff pitch (aperiodical.com/2020/05/the-bi…) : a panel from Frankfurt am Main showing counting on fingers mateturismo.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/la-…

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Dyspraxia is thinking about whether you also need to shave while picking up the shampoo bottle, then finding yourself staring at the shampoo trying to remember if it goes on your hair or your chin.

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In reply to @christianp

When I want to know what 3 quarts is, I just look at the bottom of my pan.
(#CheckMyPanPrivilege)

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @evelynjlamb

@evelynjlamb "The first number with N distinct prime factors" grows like the factorial of N. That makes 30 seem more reasonable to me.

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @heavymetalmaths

@heavymetalmaths @KarenCampe @peterrowlett yeah, on Sunday we had nothing, and now we have another week's worth of pitches!

8 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @AlexKontorovich

@AlexKontorovich @evelynjlamb I knew someone would pick me up on this! Point is they're both the product of an increasing sequence, so grow quickly

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Yes, I realised this morning that we're back to the 'perpetually imploding government ' phase of tory rule

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In reply to @samjshah

@samjshah @KarenCampe @aperiodical Voting ends on Thursday

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In reply to @christianp

Dyspraxia is your wife finishing making your sandwich for you because you spread a dollop of mayo *next to* the bread.

Twice.

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In reply to @FryRsquared

@FryRsquared @kyledevans @geoffreydahl Do you know @lyd_w? These comics are exactly her sort of thing

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @carolspringett5

@carolspringett5 @soupie66 sorry, I haven't really been playing the sticker book game

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In reply to @gregeganSF

@gregeganSF @JDHamkins Trivial for you, but someone who isn't well-practised in proof methods wouldn't come up with that quickly

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In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math How many hundreds is it now? Should I be worried?

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In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math 😬

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The #BigMathOff is close to ending again, unless some more maths appears.
If we get to 26 matches, that's 52 bits of maths, aka a full deck of cards. Exciting spin-off opportunity?
#spinoffportunity

13 favourites 4 retweets

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett I wouldn't mind if it did end

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June

In reply to @mathforge

@mathforge that's not a stat I'm interested in calculating

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Someone has just emailed me a powerpoint containing a single slide, which contains a single link, to the thing they want to show me.

Do they not know that you can put links in emails? I get people putting screenshots in powerpoints, but this is a step beyond

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In reply to @christianp

Now imagining the cursed corporate email system that forbids links in emails "for security", but allows powerpoint attachments so anyone can get their work done.

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In reply to @panlepan

@panlepan @ColinTheMathmo I also do this, and am also quickly shouted down

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Simon Plouffe has found a sequence of 565 primes in 'geometric progression' (meaning they're the closest integers to the first 565 terms of a geometric sequence)
Wowza!
Some explanation at plouffe.fr/NEW/Formula%20…

8 favourites 6 retweets

In reply to @Shona_Mu

@Shona_Mu Yes! I've sometimes felt like I need someone, even just one person, on the other side of the screen to direct my talk to.

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I'm at the "linter reports 3000 problems with the documentation" of preparing a code release

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In reply to @ben_nuttall

@ben_nuttall I thought I hadn't made a YouTube account until quite late on, but it seems I beat you!

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If you feel like you need to make a visual statement of (1) your beliefs and (2) your mega-nerdity, @realKatePoirier's brilliant "Math for equality" badges and shirts are just the thing: zazzle.co.uk/store/mathfore…
They're expensive but that's because the proceeds go to @BEAMmathHQ

11 favourites 4 retweets

In reply to @AudiC

@AudiC @MinoritySTEM @ch_nira @aperiodical I've encountered more than enough professional mathematicians who claimed not to know of any notable Black mathematicians

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I have started writing the release notes for @NclNumbas v5.0!

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Where do UK people buy computer bits from when avoiding amazon? Specifically, I want a USB webcam. Options less heinous than Argos and Curry's, please. Back in the day it was dabs, but that seems not to exist any more

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In reply to @TimandraHarknes

@TimandraHarknes Thanks! But it looks like they've sold out of webcams

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In reply to @matheknitician

@matheknitician Yeah, I did but the framerate was quite low. I have a webcam on my laptop but I want something higher quality

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I'm going to try making plaited bread. This will involve some group theory.
Follow along with me!
First, here's some dough that I've left to rise and just knocked back

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In reply to @christianp

I've divided it into 8 by cutting in half three times

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In reply to @christianp

Now I've rolled the bits into strands of equal length.
OK, similar length.

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In reply to @christianp

Next I have to connect them up like this, which reminds me of that puzzle about the hydra that I can never solve.

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In reply to @christianp

Your man Paul says: "Step 1: place 8 under 7 and over 1 Step 2: place 8 over 5 Step 3: place 2 under 3 and over 8 Step 4: place 1 over 4 Step 5: place 7 under 6 and over 1"
I need to label these tentacles

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In reply to @christianp

That looks like this. I think. I might not have done exactly the right thing, but I've definitely done some overs and unders.
To answer a comment: the numbers refer to positions, not tentacles, so you relabel after each step

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In reply to @christianp

So the immediate question is: where did each strand end up?
The steps are, in permutation notation (I say where each strand ends up) :
(2,3,4,5,6,7,8,1)
(1,2,3,4,6,7,8,5)
(1,8,2,3,4,5,6,7)
(2,3,4,1,5,6,7,8)
(2,3,4,5,6,7,1,8)

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In reply to @christianp

You can work out the final permutation by applying those in turn, to get:

(8,4,5,6,7,1,2,3)

So things don't end up where they started.

So... how many times do I have to do this to get them back where they started?

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In reply to @christianp

(brief intermission while some parenting happens)

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In reply to @christianp

One dance recital, one full potty and a cuddle later, I'm back!

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In reply to @christianp

This cycle includes every strand, so I don't get to do a fun bit of maths. I was hoping it'd be several disjoint cycles - cycles that don't share any strands.

This cycle is 8 elements long, so if I apply it 8 times I get back where I started.

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In reply to @christianp

You can write that permutation, (8,4, 5,6,7,1,2,3) as a cycle: now (a, b, c) means "a goes to b goes to c goes to a"

That is:
(1,8,3,5,7,2,4,6)

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In reply to @christianp

If the permutation *had been* a product of disjoint cycles, I could use a cool fact to work out how many times I need to apply it: the least common multiple of the lengths of all the cycles.

That's what I get for trying to apply maths in the real world...

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In reply to @christianp

Fans, I forgot to keep count. Let's say I did it a multiple of 8 times so everything's back where it started.

(ignore the big mush of I-got-bored at the end of this plait)

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In reply to @christianp

The Proof and the Pudding by Jim Henle
press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…

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In reply to @christianp

We'll see if the bread is as good as the maths!

Some books about maths and baking:

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In reply to @christianp

That's it! I'll try to add a photo when it's baked.

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In reply to @christianp

And How to Bake Pi by Eugenia Cheng
profilebooks.com/how-to-bake-pi…

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In reply to @christianp

lol 🌈

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In reply to @eqdynamics

@eqdynamics If I was applying my master's thesis, I'd show that it was impossible to undo the permutation.

Oh, wait.

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#ff for everyone who took part in the #BigMathOff this year:

(tweet 1 of 2)
@alephJamesA @mathforge @matheknitician @BiggestTriangle @K_Severn @pogonomaths @samjshah2 @ZoeLGriffiths @kyledevans @El_Timbre @SamHartburn @TedG @honeypisquared @ZenoRogue @peterrowlett

19 favourites 6 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@alephJamesA @mathforge @matheknitician @BiggestTriangle @K_Severn @pogonomaths @samjshah2 @ZoeLGriffiths @kyledevans @El_Timbre @SamHartburn @TedG @honeypisquared @ZenoRogue @peterrowlett #ff for everyone who took part in the #BigMathOff this year:

(tweet 2 of 2)
@heavymetalmaths @mscroggs @icecolbeveridge @intersectarian @PeterKagey @wsbarhem @alexcorner @VickyMaths1729 @markdcloud1 @FergusPowell @MarHarStar @jamestanton @Clare_L_Wallace @KarenCampe @TeaKayB

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In reply to @christianp

@alephJamesA @mathforge @matheknitician @BiggestTriangle @K_Severn @pogonomaths @samjshah2 @ZoeLGriffiths @kyledevans @El_Timbre @SamHartburn @TedG @honeypisquared @ZenoRogue @peterrowlett @heavymetalmaths @mscroggs @icecolbeveridge @intersectarian @PeterKagey @wsbarhem @alexcorner @VickyMaths1729 @markdcloud1 @FergusPowell @MarHarStar @jamestanton @Clare_L_Wallace @KarenCampe @TeaKayB and again for my indispensable helpers, who did so much admin to keep things ticking all along: @alephJamesA @SamHartburn @mathforge and @stecks

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This is a highly intriguing integer sequence entered into the OEIS by Scott Shannon oeis.org/A328680
I didn't rediscover it: I chopped the first 1,000 terms off a completely different sequence, and that was the only hit. I have no reason to believe there's a link. How odd!

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @icecolbeveridge @WrongButUseful brb, getting "Bigger than the Beatles (under certain choices of metric)" printed on a t-shirt

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Tweet 1 of this thread mentions a person I've had enough of, but the rest of it is a brilliant argument for trans inclusion twitter.com/NMRLPH/status/…

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Petition: Introduce Mandatory Ethnicity Pay Gap Reporting petition.parliament.uk/petitions/3001…

1 favourite 1 retweet

Once I spent most of a metro journey agonising over what to do, weighing up my own beliefs against others' rights, then just before we got to haymarket I very discreetly peeled a national front sticker off the window next to me.
Wish I was as brave as the statue topplers

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While gathering links for today's school EDI meeting, I came across this ace article by @drchris_maths on Gurruṯu, which I always mention as a great example of a dynamical system but can never remember the details of: teachermagazine.com.au/articles/indig…

4 favourites 1 retweet

The batch number on my shampoo bottle is 9⁴.
#ShowerThoughts

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In reply to @christianp

And to think some people have the impudence to ask what's the point of divisibility tricks!

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In reply to @d_yellowlees

@d_yellowlees How often do you do this?

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In reply to @NowOverAndOut

@NowOverAndOut glitch.com gives you a terminal.

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In reply to @d_yellowlees

@d_yellowlees yeah, I'm interested but don't have the spare time this Thursday

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA @close It's not in the OEIS! 🤯

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In reply to @benjamindickman

@benjamindickman @DavidKButlerUoA @close Ah, I had 19 in it, which was wrong

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I've taken the day off normal work to support the #Strike4BlackLives #ShutDownSTEM, but I've got the 2yo all day, so I need something to do in my head. I'll try planning my 'inclusive e-assessment' talk for @EAMSConf

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I want to try this with other triangle centres, particularly ones that can go outside the triangle t.co/LitEuD6EgX

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Pogs! Memories!
Who else got a set of Sunderland City Council pogs from school with messages about refuse collection and libraries? t.co/OPuGoXwWfd

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This is one of the first paintings I can remember noticing and appreciating. Such a calming scene. twitter.com/LaingArtGaller…

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When we started planning to run @EAMSConf online this year, one of my main reasons was how hard it is for many to travel to the UK.
We've had more international registrations than normal, but still largely UK, EU and USA.
I want to do more to reach outside this bubble.

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

So, please spread the word: @EAMSConf is a free, entirely online conference about e-assessment in mathematical subjects, largely focusing on open source software. It starts 22nd June. More info at eams.ncl.ac.uk

2 favourites 7 retweets

In reply to @chalkdustmag

@chalkdustmag @SparksMaths sorry, the version of me that has abundant spare time isn't on twitter

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I keep seeing photos of 'packed' beaches and parks in the news. I'd like to see how that compares to the density of people in a terraced street. If the walls weren't there, what would it look like?

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Problem: people signing up for a conference sometimes make typos in their email address.

Solution: bulk email the entire participant list, and wait for "message undelivered" responses.

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In reply to @permutans

@permutans here's my code: gist.github.com/christianp/a92…
Looks like a pretty brute force program!

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Currently stuck in a very British conversation that could be replaced by the following program:

10 ECHO "Great, thanks."
20 GOTO 10

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In reply to @El_Timbre

@El_Timbre Great, thanks.

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In reply to @aperiodical

@aperiodical A #piku about the sum of the reciprocals of the square numbers:

π × π
is
six times greater

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In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math I'm going to hang on until we're back with the quadrivium

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Very much enjoying using @explainevrythng to record my @EAMSConf talk.
First run through, with lots of pauses and umms, took 10:51 of my allotted 10:00. Not bad!

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My turbo professional @EAMSConf hosting setup.

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Mathematicians working in French universities: do you do any kind of computer-based assessment? What systems do you use?

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In reply to @christianp

Mathématicien(ne)s travaillant en universités françaises: est-ce que vous faites des évaluations sur ordinateur? Quels systèmes utilisez-vous?

0 favourites 2 retweets

The difference between necessary and sufficient conditions: they say only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, but while this Englishman is happy to go out, my mad dog is not.

4 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Je voulais peut-être dire 'devoirs', je ne sais pas le mot juste

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In reply to @mathforge

@mathforge @bbarber_ @peterrowlett "The Haskell road to logic, math and programming" (staff.fnwi.uva.nl/d.j.n.vaneijck…) is very good. There seems to be a PDF on Kees Doets' homepage

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Me: storytelling is a wonderfully creative activity. Starting from a basic plot I can refine the story each time I tell it.

The toddler: if you so much as change one word from last time I swear I won't sleep until 2050

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How high does zoom's market cap have to get before they let you use a 24-hour clock in the date picker?

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In reply to @northumbriana

@northumbriana @NewcastleMedSch Me too! How much worse than chance did you do on the rearranging-colours task?

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What do you think the difference between "Maybe" and "Not sure" is?

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In reply to @christianp

The council cabinet has 10 members. "Balance" would be 5 men and 5 women (assuming a gender binary...)

What are the chances of exactly that happening in a meritocracy? Just under 25%. Far from odds on! (wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+tr…)

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Let's take Greg in good faith and suppose he wants a meritocracy, where gender isn't considered.
So each position has a 50% chance of being filled by a woman. (1/N)
twitter.com/nick_forbes/st…

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In reply to @christianp

Of course, there is widespread gender bias, in favour of men, so this cherry-picking is either ignorant or dishonest. It's certainly not evidence that there's a problem of too many women.
You can make just about any stat you like with a small enough sample.

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In reply to @christianp

The chance of having 7 or more women is just over 17%. (wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+tr…)

So even if there was no gender bias, you'd expect 1 in 6 councils in the country to look this imbalanced (or 1 in 3 if you include imbalance the other way, with 7 or more men)

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In reply to @FergusPowell

@FergusPowell Zoinks! What does your supervisor do? I'd hope every supervisor would recommend a reference management system these days

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In reply to @ptwiddle

@ptwiddle @FergusPowell I bet you've got a hand-me-down TeX template as well, you monster

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Kit_Yates_Maths

@Kit_Yates_Maths I'd really like a public spreadsheet listing named theorems or objects, next to alternative names. Might set that up

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @roger_mansuy

@roger_mansuy J'aime beaucoup le fer à repasser! Je vais l'utiliser moi-même.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @roger_mansuy

@roger_mansuy Incroyable

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In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs @pecnuts never mind hats, did you know there's a latex package for ironing symbols? twitter.com/roger_mansuy/s…

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In reply to @christianp

No idea why my phone completed @Pecnut to @pecnuts

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In reply to @LucasVB

@LucasVB But I have ℵ₁ wishes

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In reply to @sangwinc

@sangwinc That's brilliant. It winds me up that my daughter's alphabet jigsaw is cut so that some letters can fit in more than one place.

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This is a very good book twitter.com/robotmaths/sta…

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I've just delivered my talk on inclusive e-assessment at @EAMSConf. The video, transcription, and references are online at staff.ncl.ac.uk/christian.perf…

6 favourites 3 retweets

In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway A knowledge of the rule for deciding who serves is what I'm lacking

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway can I wave my hands at having identified that point and say I've solved the problem? Feels a bit like that joke about the mathematician who wakes up to find a fire in his room

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In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston @panlepan I've definitely looked askance at 39 in the past

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge which episode?

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They said: Cauchy-Schwartz.

YouTube heard: koshish warts.

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@katemath wow. "Deeply problematic" is an understatement!

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July

My "mathematicians for inclusion" and "mathematicians for change" stickers have finally arrived!

16 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

They're by @realKatePoirier and you can get your own at zazzle.com/store/mathfore…

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In reply to @aperfect

@aperfect "story"

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About to discover if I can send an email BCCed to over 400 people

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In reply to @christianp

Based on the number of out of office replies I'm getting, it looks like the answer is yes

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Explain why you'll never have to carry a 9 when doing long multiplication

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In reply to @FergusPowell

@FergusPowell @gloombario Yep, that's the unexpectedly awkward wrinkle I wanted to share

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @evelynjlamb

@evelynjlamb I worry that if someone in a restaurant kitchen is contagious, they're going to infect a lot more people than just the other staff

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In reply to @mathsjem

@mathsjem @El_Timbre I'm a big fan of those pictures.

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Not a single place name on this map sounds real.

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That's nowhere near an accurate transcription of this video but now I''ve got the opening lyrics for my new album

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA @MathforLove @JSEllenberg Yeah, I've got no idea where the red text is

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Supperman.
#AddALetterImproveASuperhero

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I'd like to share some thoughts from @EAMSConf, which ran a couple of weeks ago, to help anyone else running an online conference.

We were lucky that we'd decided to do everything online back in January, so all the hard thinking was done before lockdown started.

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In reply to @christianp

We decided to go online because of the subject of the conference (e-assessment) but also in order to include more people around the world who would find it hard or impossible to get to Newcastle for a physical conference.

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In reply to @christianp

Having decided to move online, we realised that the normal format of a couple of days packed with activities wasn't necessary or even desirable. Unlike travelling to another city, there's nothing stopping you just abandoning an online conference halfway through.

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In reply to @christianp

Travelling for a conference is a huge burden in time, energy and money, even when you don't need a visa. Personally, I'm restricted in what I can attend because Ehlers-Danlos syndrome leaves me shattered after a day of travel and standing talking.

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In reply to @christianp

So, we set a hard rule of two one-hour live sessions each day, at 9am and 4pm, spread across eight days instead of the normal two.
I think that worked really well, and the feedback from attendees agrees.

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In reply to @christianp

And, as most of us have discovered since, staring at a video call all day is knackering. There's also a timezone problem: there are only short times in the day when the UK working day overlaps with the Americas or the far east.

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In reply to @christianp

All questions were taken through the course website using a stackoverflow-like interface, rather than Zoom. This worked brilliantly. It let moderators carefully pick and reword questions, rather than the mess of unmuting people, and conversation could continue afterwards.

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In reply to @christianp

In the live sessions, we had a chair who introduced speakers and read out questions at the end, and someone else (always me) who played out pre-recorded videos via screen share. This worked better than expected! I forgot the sound a couple of times, but nothing terrible happened.

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In reply to @christianp

A lot of the talks were pre-recorded. I think maybe they should all have been. A couple of the non-recorded talks had technology problems, in spite of our efforts to rehearse beforehand.

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In reply to @christianp

We initially planned for more interactive sessions, such as workshops for the popular systems, but they made way for more talks. I think we should have made sure to keep them. There was very little of the sort of casual discussion you get at break times in a physical conference.

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In reply to @christianp

(We used the MoodleOverflow plugin: moodle.org/plugins/mod_mo…)

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In reply to @christianp

"Main", for conference info, general discussion, and reference. The general questions MoodleOverflow was used a bit, but the standard forum and wiki-style reference not at all.
There was an "introduce yourself" glossary which a few dozen people used, but nothing happened with it.

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In reply to @christianp

For non-Zoom activity, we set up a Moodle environment. It worked brilliantly, but some bits were used less than I hoped. We really wanted to give attendees an opportunity to see in action the systems we were talking about.
I set up four areas:

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In reply to @christianp

"Talks", with a link to the zoom meeting, recordings of all the sessions and individual talks, the question areas, and associated material such as slides. This worked very well.

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In reply to @christianp

"Play area", where everyone was enrolled with teacher privileges. I hoped that people would use this to try out the systems we had access to or show off things arising in discussion, but nobody touched it. We'll have to rethink how this should work next time.

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In reply to @christianp

"Software demos", with a course for each system being presented. There was a MoodleOverflow questions section for each system, which was well-used.
The stats show that only a couple dozen attendees clicked on anything in these sections.

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In reply to @christianp

I don't know how much people who didn't attend live sessions engaged with the non-live material. None of the recordings had more than 60 views at the end of the conference.
We were advised to expect about a quarter of people who signed up to actually attend live sessions.

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In reply to @christianp

We kept registration open throughout the conference. We had just over 300 registrations on the morning it started, and 420 by the end. Attendance in the live sessions was in the 80s early on, down to around 60 by the end.

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In reply to @christianp

Feedback from attendees: they really liked the stretched-out format, and the short sessions. Most made use of the recordings. Many missed the ad hoc discussion you get in person.

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In reply to @christianp

All the videos went on a YouTube channel (youtube.com/channel/UCMN_1…). Every video was initially unlisted, available only through the conference website. Now they're published and linked from the conference website: eams.ncl.ac.uk/programme/

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In reply to @christianp

In conclusion: A++ would do it this way again.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math Massive school run envy.

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I think I gave my brain a stitch. twitter.com/Mathgarden/sta…

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @d_yellowlees

@d_yellowlees Dramatic late entrance, say nothing, write one word on blackboard, wait for applause

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @statto

@statto Another benefit is it'll mean we finally have a real-world analogy for those infuriating coin-weighing puzzles

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In reply to @alisonkiddle

@ajk_44 How many spikes?

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I have just learnt about unicode property escapes in regular expressions. Wow! developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web…

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In reply to @AmyJCast

@AmyJCast @c0mplexnumber @amanda_l_austin I didn't know I needed flowery Columbus cubes in my life!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @HappeLab

@HappeLab I find video meetings more comfortable but also more tiring.

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In reply to @C_J_Smith

@C_J_Smith Weirdo

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In reply to @bundlegerbe

@bundlegerbe @monsoon0 @nhoskee I suggest we call them Lawson numbers

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Endlessly proud of Mrs L-P. On consecutive days she has voluntarily spotted a prime number *and* a fencepost error!

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In reply to @InertialObservr

@InertialObservr @SLSingh did Simon share it somewhere?

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In reply to @TimahR_S

@TimahR_S @standupmaths @InertialObservr @SLSingh The most common wrong answers are, in decreasing order of frequency:
51,57,39,1,63,5,69,49,59,79

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In reply to @mathsjem

@mathsjem @greg_roberts86 @MissStokesMaths did it go away?

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In reply to @greg_roberts86

@greg_roberts86 @mathsjem @MissStokesMaths At first glance I thought you were saying your score was 143 and I nearly had a heart attack!

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In reply to @peon47

@peon47 @lukemckinney The short answer is, lots of statements are simpler to state if 1 isn't prime.
For a longer answer, there's this good history paper: arxiv.org/abs/1209.2007v2

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In reply to @LauraKTully

@LauraKTully @SLSingh Crikey, tell your 8 year old he did better than I did, and I made the thing!

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @evelynjlamb BRB, writing an expository essay about this expository essay about an expository essay.
(Evelyn's post is probably where I first picked up the Caldwell reference)

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In reply to @MissStokesMaths

@MissStokesMaths @mathsjem @greg_roberts86 It's great fun getting a class of kids to shout 'yes!' and 'NO!!!' while one of them attempts to play the game on the projector

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"The swing didn't stop, daddy! I wonder why..."

I'll take that as 90% of a law of motion from the toddler. They say just asking the right question is the hardest part of science, don't they?

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In reply to @evelynjlamb

@evelynjlamb So cool!
I had a tantrum trying to sew a mask, so my 2 year old will have to remain unmatched

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In reply to @JWGarratt

@JWGarratt @SLSingh Well done! Was that with the standard time limit?

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Next door are having a new conservatory built.

Me, a genius: today I will subtitle two hours of video.

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In reply to @RobertTalbert

@RobertTalbert I completely agree that we need to trust students rather than set up more barriers, but I don't agree that the incentive to cheat goes away. If I as a student don't want to do any work, I can still get someone else to do it for me under mastery grading.

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In reply to @northumbriana

@northumbriana I thought this photo might get me closer to understanding a tiny niggle that's bothered me for years, but I don't think it does.
Why do the house numbers on Sandringham Drive start at 8? There's nowhere for numbers 1 to 7 to fit even if they had once existed and been demolished

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Oooooooh twitter.com/ehardy21/statu…

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wow, the Executable Book Project looks good: executablebooks.org/en/latest/
Even on its own, having Sphinx's features with markdown syntax is so good!

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@ChronInvisSTEM Who says it doesn't get to go in your CV?

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@ChronInvisSTEM You're a nonstandard person! The kind of person they should hire!

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I've seen some combinatorial underestimates on packaging before, but this one looks particularly low.
#TheyDidntDoTheMath

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In reply to @DrCaroSummers

@DrCaroSummers In that case, they could have put it as "the vast majority of these clothes clash with each other!"

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron I watched the whole thing recently. It's a quality film!

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In reply to @evelynjlamb

@evelynjlamb "Maybe the real roots of the function were the friends we made along the way..."

<gif from the end of Buckaroo Banzai>

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In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle Too many worms. Steering clear of this.

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Oh, it's π approximation day, 22/7. I nearly didn't notice!

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An estimation problem: how many tweets do you see each day?
I'm tempted to say "wrong answers only", but I'd actually like to know the right answer. So, do either, and it'll be fun to guess which is which

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In reply to @dichigedamaar

@dichigedamaar @garima_1909 It's a very high score, but not quite the highest. Well done!

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Oh my god, I've just remembered I've been waiting since March for a rheumatology appointment twitter.com/chronicallycal…

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In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK SUPERSLUG!!!

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In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs @peterrowlett @HappyApproxDay You've given yourself space to improve.

1 favourite 0 retweets

Once I spent ages looking for my keys, but then I found them in the last place I looked twitter.com/fermatslibrary…

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In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math @fermatslibrary I'll guess 'something to do with catastrophe theory'

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Just realised my GCSEs are old enough to do their A Levels

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We're about to see a spate of newspaper stories featuring people who think 0 is both even and odd, again. twitter.com/NewcastleCC/st…

9 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @stecks Ah yes, the fiendish villain known as Batman's Complement

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August

10:24. Gotta love it

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In reply to @christianp

I have a friend who calls 10:24 "2 to 10". I think it's a brilliant way of getting people to turn up half an hour early

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In reply to @JimPropp

@JimPropp I think this was an abuse of grammar to make the pun work. It took me a while to work out what he meant.

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Skilfully dodged the two odd numbered days in a row problem last week! twitter.com/NewcastleCC/st…

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I'm sure this must already be a thing, but I can't come up with the right google words to find it, so I've made my own:
A tool to take a subtitles file and a video and make a page showing the transcript alongside the video itself.
github.com/christianp/tra…

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

At the moment it just copes with Vimeo, because that's where the two videos I want it for are hosted.
Here's one of them: numbas.org.uk/talks/numbas-t…
I have a load of @EAMSConf talks on YouTube, so I'll support that next

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In reply to @christianp

@EAMSConf I'd like to know if this is worth having, and if it is, how it could be improved.
I'm particularly interested in accessibility: is it usable with a screenreader?

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In reply to @permutans

@permutans I don't think any of the results there do what I want - display a video along with the transcript

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Does it bother anyone else that this says x1 and then 1x?

7 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue @ProfKinyon The - is a list marker, not a minus sign

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Me: Today I will get some good honest work done.

Everyone I've ever had any sort of professional dealing with: <just an unremitting stream of nonsense>

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In reply to @christianp

If you emailed me today, I value and cherish every interaction with you.

It's just, in aggregate, it's all a bit much.

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared What

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In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK keep watching Robin Hood until they cut you off?

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It's 5/8, or Almost The Worst Approximation to Φ day!

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In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs on a related subject, I can't remember if it was you that told me about this, but just in case it wasn't: have you seen the Ramanujan machine? Lots of nice continued fractions for constants: ramanujanmachine.com

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How many decimal digits would it take to write down the number of hamburgers you've eaten so far?

4 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston I can describe an algorithm, but it won't be fast

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In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston @RAnachro yep, that's what I had in mind

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @ccppurcell

@ccppurcell God help me if I ever try to hire anyone based on their answer to a question like this

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @NewcastleEduca1

@NewcastleEduca1 @UniofNewcastle @Tegglington @NclNumbas @NCLMathsStats This isn't a work account, but thanks!

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"Daughter, are your knickers wet?"

"No, daddy!"

Turned out she didn't have any on.
Vacuous truth: the last refuge of the scoundrel.

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Chillies! Grown outside! In the North of England!
#SpicyMiracle

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I've had answers of 1, 3 and 4 digits. Can anyone credibly answer 2 or 5? twitter.com/christianp/sta…

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Rats, my brilliant plan to use just the right amount of annual leave has been scuppered by a bank holiday.

*yells in unpaid work*

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In reply to @MrBsMaths

@MrBsMaths @mathsjem @Just_Maths @tessmaths There are tonnes. I make one, aimed at Higher Ed but also usable at secondary: @NclNumbas

2 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @JimPropp

@JimPropp I think I have seen this book in a second hand book shop!
But sorry, I can't remember any more details than you already have.

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo I think you might be missing some context: meaww.com/brooklyn-new-y…

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Apart from anything else, I really like that cover twitter.com/DrEugeniaCheng…

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@NathanielProf @DisabledStem @ChronInvisSTEM Converting to HTML is the best thing to do. PDF is really only good for print. There are loads of tools that will do it automatically. Pandoc and PlasTeX are two.

1 favourite 1 retweet

Ableism: assuming everyone can access your lectures.

Abelism: assuming it doesn't matter what order you deliver them.

16 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @bbarber_

@bbarber_ Nomacs is alright. Works a lot like irfanview on windows

1 favourite 0 retweets

@NathanielProf @DisabledStem @ChronInvisSTEM You can make a single HTML file, which can be uploaded to Blackboard. I can put together some instructions tomorrow

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@NathanielProf @DisabledStem @ChronInvisSTEM With pandoc, you need to explicitly ask for mathjax with the --mathjax command line option

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In reply to @panlepan

@panlepan @geogebra @christianmercat c pas moi!

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In reply to @FryRsquared

@FryRsquared I wonder if "A Level algorithm" will enter common use as a shorthand for a statistical error, like the tank counting and damaged bomber problems from WW2.

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A helpful message added by IT to the bottom of an email thread in my inbox: "Warning: this message came outside from the university".

One problem: my university, or theirs?

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I have a user interface problem that I hope isn't only solved by adding yet another option for authors to understand.

Student types a mathematical expression. We want to allow implicit multiplication, so `xy` is interpreted as `x*y`.
What to do about `pi`? Is it `p*i` or `π`?

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In reply to @christianp

My guess is that most of the time, you'd expect it to be interpreted as π. But it's completely reasonable that you might be doing something with complex numbers, and `p*i` is really what you meant.
I suppose rendering π would at least give you a hint to add the * symbol

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In reply to @GhostMutt

@GhostMutt It doesn't replace what they type - there's a plain text input field, and a graphical rendering of the interpreted expression next to it. The interpreted expression is then marked.

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In reply to @GhostMutt

@GhostMutt I do, but that's not something I want to do

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In the vein of "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names", I'd like to read "Falsehoods Politicians Believe About Statistics".

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In reply to @christianp

If you haven't seen the thing about names, it's by @patio11 and I highly recommend it: kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/fal…
And there's a list that makes me think every belief held by programmers is false: github.com/kdeldycke/awes…

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In reply to @christianp

I'll start the list of Falsehoods Politicians Believe About Statistics. Please add in your own!

1: The success of a policy objective can be measured.
2: There's only one way of measuring success.
3: If the average has increased, everything has increased.

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In reply to @christianp

* A 5% decrease followed by a 5% increase is a net zero change.

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In reply to @christianp

For reference, @Desmos does implicit multiplication for most letter pairs, but replaces 'pi' with the symbol π. Pressing backspace just deletes the entire symbol. You have to type 'p*i' to get the product of p and i.

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In reply to @christianp

@Desmos @geogebra also does implicit multiplication most of the time, and 'pi' is interpreted as 3.14... but it isn't replaced with the symbol.

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I've got a half-written @aperiodical post titled "The Enormous Difficulty of Telling the Truth with Statistics" that was mainly about @My_Metro escalators. The alevelgorithm might prompt me to finish it.

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In reply to @marcuswu

@marcuswu I think you're solving the parsing problem, which isn't as hard. What I'm concerned about is the practicality of students using this - they shouldn't be expected to understand how the parser works. They're often shown juxtaposed letters meaning multiplication, so they do it too

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In reply to @Tony_Mann

@Tony_Mann And 'sin2x' could be just about anything. This is a rabbit hole I don't want to spelunk in!

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Add a frisson of peril to statements of fact with the word 'currently'!

My house is currently two miles inland.
Money can currently be exchanged for goods and services.
The official language of France is currently French.

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In reply to @christianp

This tweet was prompted by the realisation that we often say "the current Government" but never "the current Royal family"

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In reply to @christianp

There are currently 24 hours in a day

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In reply to @NclNumbas

@NclNumbas This is a convenience feature that arose from writing this year's exams - quite often we had questions with several scenarios, each with multiple corresponding bits of data.

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In reply to @christianp

@NclNumbas The variable generation consisted of making lists of the values for each scenario, picking a list at random, then assigning each item from the chosen list to a different variable. This change makes it possible to do all of that in one go.

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I've been seeing all sorts of doctors about why I'm so wobbly since I was 17. Now 34, and we've narrowed it down to "maybe Ehlers-Danlos, see a rheumatologist". twitter.com/_SamBosworth/s…

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My computer's processor uses 64 bit addressing AND chessboards are made of 64 squares, each either black or white, BUT I have yet to see a tool which shows my computer's memory layout using chessboards.
#SortItOut

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In reply to @apgox

@apgox Henry Ford has two motorised contraptions named after him: the car and the vacuum cleaner.
😐

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I'm alarmed to discover I want to learn more about alarms twitter.com/alicecbennett/…

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In reply to @extremefriday

@extremefriday What are all the smoke detectors for? Do they hold a vote?

In undergrad, I lived in a flat whose smoke detectors seemed to be tuned to "someone thought about making toast"

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Today I planned to write a series of introductory @NclNumbas tutorials.

Four hours later, still on the first one: nobody has ever given a correct answer to a maths question, and I don't think anyone ever will.

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In reply to @christianp

@NclNumbas 90% of my time has been spent trying to find ways around writing "I'm sorry you have to touch a computer in order to make this happen."

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In reply to @christianp

@NclNumbas I think the root of the problem is I'm trying to anticipate every possible objection to anything I recommend. Maybe I should just write out a list of instructions, then deal with pedantic objections at the end of the document

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In reply to @jamesgrime

@jamesgrime @icecolbeveridge @njj4 *reclusive millionaire superhero Binary Man takes a long, hard look at his finances*

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In reply to @MrBishopGeog

@MrBishopGeog "Is That A Big Number" by @itabn_andrew is sometimes good for comparing big numbers. It says it's 50 times the biomass of the Earth: isthatabignumber.com/itabn/compare?…

1 favourite 0 retweets

Over on mathstodon.xyz, our Mastodon instance for mathematicians, I've just implemented live LaTeX preview while writing a post.

6 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @aperfect

@aperfect I can't remember ever actually playing that

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I've made a clock which runs through every permutation of a deck of cards, swapping one pair every second.
It's not very useful.
permutation-clock.glitch.me

24 favourites 3 retweets

In reply to @christianp

This nonsense brought to you by this nonsense: mathstodon.xyz/@christianp/10…

1 favourite 0 retweets

Euler was born 57 years after Descartes died. twitter.com/MathType/statu…

17 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

I reckon they meant to say 'independently' instead of 'simultaneously'.
Now thinking about what other facts would be livened up by substituting one of those words for the other.

3 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @Andrew_Taylor

@Andrew_Taylor @lunasorcery I'm disappointed that the software section is so wishy-washy. Surely public version control would allow someone to find a program whose source code doesn't have a single line in common with its first release

2 favourites 0 retweets

I'm getting strong DO NOT STEP ON THE DANGER GEOMETRY warnings from my hypothalamus while watching this twitter.com/RFJamesUK/stat…

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @stecks

@stecks A model of mathematics is either complete or condescending. #ChangeOneWordAndRuinATheorem

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Frantically tidying things up before I go on annual leave followed by paternity leave!

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Why is outlook so insistent that I should write "must" instead of "has to" because it's more concise?

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I love it when I rediscover an integer sequence with an enormous OEIS entry: oeis.org/A008292

3 favourites 1 retweet

Six years after the last one, I've done another Aperiodical Round Up.
Now *that's* aperiodic! twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

I've made a version which uses a deck of cards instead of emoji, and starts at the unix epoch instead of whenever you open the page: unix-permutation-clock.glitch.me

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @lunasorcery

@lunasorcery I think knowing this was coming made it even better

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @matheknitician @MathsObjects Sorry, my fault yesterday while I was upgrading wordpress

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett I think that's enough to pass the stage 1 pure maths module

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @matheknitician @MathsObjects fixed now, I think

1 favourite 0 retweets

In a few days my wife's 99-year-old grandma will have 27 direct descendants down to great-grandchildren, meaning the Lawson family has an R rate of exactly 3

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron I know at least one has a Bacon number

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@DrElleOBrien @FryRsquared Ah now, the Perfect R rate is much lower!

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In reply to @benjamin_leis

@benjamin_leis Yep!

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Tribute to Sol LeWitt

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September

In reply to @colourblindorg

@colourblindorg I'd totally follow a twitter account that each day tweeted a different thing and told colourblind people what colour it is.

5 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @soupie66

@soupie66 @colourblindorg Please stop. This isn't funny

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In reply to @NTCouncilTeam

@NTCouncilTeam @GoSmarterNT I wish I'd seen this a few hours earlier before I cleaned my bike!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway That's a nice one

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @samjshah

@samjshah I don't know what this means, but: a POGs round

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In reply to @cs_kaplan

@cs_kaplan @henryseg @thedicelab I came here to say this. Pity it has negative connotations because it's a strong pun

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In reply to @benjamin_leis

@benjamin_leis @mathforge @MrHonner @KarenCampe @UDMichy @geogebra @MathforAmerica Ooh, a Geogebra @elmlang binding might be a fun project

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I can't imagine what prompted this integer sequence: "Least multiple of n in which the n-th digit from left is 3."
oeis.org/A113558

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Our second L-P is finally out. Early reviews describe him as "sleepy" and "cuddly".

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@katemath Preferably with a clip of this scene from Good Will Hunting

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twitter.com/christianmerca…

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The baby's stomach seems to be able to measure three hours to the second.
Is it too late to apply for the longitude prize?

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In reply to @MathigonOrg

@MathigonOrg @Mathgarden I've encountered this kind of thing as well with @NclNumbas. I usually reply something like "we don't sell anything, I'm happy to answer any questions you have", but I think I'm less bothered about whether they use my software than you are

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @FOTSN

@FOTSN @standupmaths numbergossip.com/34 says that 34 is the smallest number with the property that it and its neighbors have the same number of divisors.
It also says something @standupmaths probably already knows: 34 is the magic constant of a 4 by 4 magic square

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs The Kevin Bacon Cinematic Universe

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Can't foresee needing to recite an interesting fact about (15-4√2)/8), but in case I ever do, this entry now exists.
Try to guess what it is before you click on the link. I was nowhere near! twitter.com/Parcly_Taxel/s…

4 favourites 0 retweets

Is this a nephroid?

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In reply to @bbarber_

@bbarber_ I'll take either of those over what my former colleague used to do: \;\;\;\,

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @IRainsby

@IRainsby Alright Magritte, how've you been?

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In reply to @HoeflerCo

@HoeflerCo Is that equals sign not in the same plane as the people? It looks like it's sneaking up on them

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In reply to @HoeflerCo

@HoeflerCo Actually, now I can only see this: 😭

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In reply to @mathhombre

@mathhombre I started writing "math is hard" to be provocative, but decided against. But since nobody suggested anything else, here it is.

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway This is begging for empirical validation. Can it do better than an order of magnitude guess by eyeball? What's the right precision to use for the final estimate?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway Yes, I'd be impressed with a number correct to 0.5 metres.
For very plump trees (or wide and deep houses), do you have a horizon problem, where you can't see the very top of the tree?

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Tweet me one word and I will reply with a related bit of mathematics.

(until I get bored or the baby needs attention)

29 favourites 8 retweets

In reply to @samholloway

@samholloway A cat chasing a mouse on a graph is a well-studied area of problems, e.g. "catching a mouse on a tree" read.somethingorotherwhatever.com/entry/Catching…

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett Lava's conjecture states that "Giuga numbers are the solutions of the differential equation n' = n+1, where n' is the arithmetic derivative of n"
arxiv.org/abs/1103.2298

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson The song "badger badger badger" in its original form contains the word "badger" 45 times.
(sorry, I can try harder if this is not sufficiently mathematical)

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @olliethinks

@olliethinks Each of these sandals has fundamental group ℤ³

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In reply to @ionicasmeets

@ionicasmeets @stecks One of my favourite animals, but the most mathematical connection I can get is that it's name looks like what I say when asked to do a 180° turn: "OK, a π!"

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @alancameron65

@alancameron65 @stecks "The Phillip Island penguin parade (a mathematical treatment)" by Serena Dipierro, Luca Lombardini, Pietro Miraglio, Enrico Valdinoci
arxiv.org/abs/1611.08715

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In reply to @b_penders

@b_penders @ionicasmeets "Mathematics, morally" by @DrEugeniaCheng
eugeniacheng.com/wp-content/upl… (a PDF file)

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In reply to @theclairodactyl

@theclairodactyl I hoped someone would ask for eggs! See this compendious collection of mathematical models for the shape of an egg, by Jürgen Köller: mathematische-basteleien.de/eggcurves.htm

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Manuel_do_rio

@Manuel_do_rio @stecks I mean, what do you want? My favourite homeomorphism?
Here's a mug that isn't homeomorphic to a doughnut: mathsgear.co.uk/products/extre…

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @SvenHilbrants

@SvenHilbrants "A singular mathematical promenade" by Etienne Ghys is an excellent book about singularity theory (and lots of other things) arxiv.org/abs/1612.06373…

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@BroekeNina @ionicasmeets That's two words, I think?

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@rob_m_curry "The hammer and nail phenomenon in mathematics education" by Kien H. Lim

files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED573…

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In reply to @ionicasmeets

@ionicasmeets @janbeuving Any advice before I lose an entire afternoon to this?

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In reply to @Marijevhouw

@Marijevhouw @ionicasmeets "Mathematics applied to dressmaking" by Christopher Zeeman contains a fun anecdote about trying to make mathematical sense of a dress pattern
lms.ac.uk/content/mathem…

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @edskeizer

@edskeizer @ionicasmeets The Levenshtein distance on strings is often used to find the closest correctly-spelled word to a typo en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshte…

7 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @IllestPreacha

@IllestPreacha "Treachery! When fairy chess pieces attack" by Christopher Hanusa and Arvind V. Mahankali
arxiv.org/abs/1901.01917
"We introduce a new 1D discrete dynamical system reminiscent of mathematical billiards that arises in the study of two-move riders, a type of fairy chess piece."

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@BasHelpt @ionicasmeets "The mathematics of love" by @FryRsquared: ted.com/talks/hannah_f…

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@logicmonkey0 @stecks Jim Fowler, Andrew Groot, Deven Pandya and Bart Snapp solve the "no three in a line" problem on a torus by computing Gröbner bases: arxiv.org/abs/1203.6604v1

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In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson I googled the lyrics and did not include the title

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In reply to @louisabro

@louisabro @ionicasmeets Veel geluk voor te zoon!

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In reply to @AlistairFrith

@AlistairFrith @stecks "no fibonacci" is a harder than "no graph theory" for leaves.

Avoiding both: here's what's claimed to be the first mathematical model for how buds grow into leaves youtube.com/watch?v=G4lLGT…

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Quantum__Walker

@Meromorphic_ I could go and dig up some biomathematics about how endorphins interact in the body, but instead I'll go with a lovely piece of music that produces endorphins in me: Two Dots by Lusine
youtube.com/watch?v=4iIvRX…

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In reply to @SparksMaths

@SparksMaths "Liars and their motivation", a series of puzzles in a blog post by Tanya Khovanova: blog.tanyakhovanova.com/2014/02/liars-…

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @miclugo

@miclugo will this video on mathematical present wrapping by @stecks satisfy you? youtube.com/watch?v=NwmHHL…

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In reply to @christianp

@AlistairFrith @stecks I'm coming back to this because I've just found the thing I first thought of, and I'm unlikely to get 'leaves' again: House of Leaves of Grass, a combinatoric poem: fugitivetexts.net/houseleavesgra…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @EmmaSManning

@EmmaSManning What's purple and commutes?

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @ccppurcell

@ccppurcell @jjsanderson Unlike in set theory, there is often more than one empty sett.

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @FranMaths

@FranMaths they say you either love marmite or you hate it. Intuitionist mathematicians reject the law of the excluded middle.
In "Meaning in Classical Mathematics: Is it at Odds with Intuitionism?", Karin Usadi Katz and Mikhail G. Katz consider infinitesimals with respect to intuitionism

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @ViviennevdWalle

@ViviennevdWalle @ionicasmeets "Dynamical models of love" by J.C. Sprott
sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pubs/paper277.…
"This paper examines a sequence of dynamical models involving coupled ordinary differential equations describing the time-variation of the love or hate displayed by individuals in a romantic relationship"

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @alephJamesA

@alephJamesA "Train sets" by Adam Chalcraft and Michael Greene proves that model train sets are Turing complete.
monochrom.at/turingtrainter…
I can do 'trains' again if needed.

5 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @BracewellMr

@BracewellMr @stecks Paul Erdős offered cash bounties for solving mathematical problems. After his death, they were administered by Ron Graham. I'm not sure if anyone's taken over since Ron died this year.
Here's an article about them: quantamagazine.org/cash-for-math-…

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Pierelint

@Pierelint I feel there's something at the back of my mind that would be more appropriate, but I'll pick on "super" and give you "H-supermagic labelings for firecrackers, banana trees and flowers" which is pretty supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
arxiv.org/abs/1607.07911…

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@dd4ta "Mathematics with a metamathematical flavour" by @wtgowers
dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/metamat…

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In reply to @sara_marine

@sara_marine Sticking to what you know, is it?

"Index of Lie algebras of seaweed type" by Vladimir Dergachev and Alexandre Kirillov
emis.de/journals/JLT/v…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @RamakerNiels

@RamakerNiels "Cool irrational numbers and their rather cool rational approximations" by Francesco Calogero
link.springer.com/article/10.100… (sorry, closed access)

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In reply to @aa42john

@aa42john "The perils of birth weight--a lesson from directed acyclic graphs" by Allen J Wilcox
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16931545/

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared "Why does women's fertility end in mid-life? Grandmothering and age at last birth" by Peter S. Kim, John S. McQueen and Kristen Hawkes
arxiv.org/abs/1906.12048
(link does not equal endorsement)

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In reply to @theblub

@theblub Is that a word? I can barely see it

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In reply to @theblub

@theblub "The accuracy of Buffon's needle: a rule of thumb used by ants to estimate area" by S. T. Mugford, E. B. Mallon and N. R. Franks.
academic.oup.com/beheco/article…

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared I have a feeling I've seen this paper before in the context of an angry refutation.

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In reply to @RichardElwes

@RichardElwes Rhombicuboctadodecahedron

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared Looking forward to their follow-up paper, "Men: Why?"

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In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokushinb…

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In reply to @benorlin

@benorlin I can't do you a koala, but I can do you a kangaroo: "How long does it take to catch a wild kangaroo?" by Ravi Montenegro and Prasad Tetali
arxiv.org/abs/0812.0789v2

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In reply to @TobyBailey

@TobyBailey "Haruspicy and anisotropic generating functions" by Andrew Rechnitzer
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

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In reply to @KerryLiles

@KerryLiles I hope you'll accept something that applies to any citrus: "Orange Peels and Fresnel Integrals" by Laurent Bartholdi and André G. Henriques.
arxiv.org/abs/1202.3033

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In reply to @dandersod

@dandersod "Battling over barrels" by William Deringer in cabinet magazine is a brilliant essay on the development of calculus and statistics to establish the alcohol content of beer. Subscription required, sorry, but @cabinetmagazine is fabulous.
cabinetmagazine.org/issues/49/deri…

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In reply to @PickAardvark

@PickAardvark Ramanujan was famously perspicacious. The most widely know examples of this was when he remarked that the number of Hardy's taxi, 1729, is the smallest integer that can be expressed as a sum of two positive integer cubes in two distinct ways.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Rosalot

@Rosalot I can do you another fish: the mathematical tetrodon. Mathematical only by name, I think. publicdomainreview.org/essay/dr-mitch…
How the devil are you? It's been ages!

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In reply to @Rosalot

@Rosalot Well, here's a mathematical not tion editor called Guppy: guppy.js.org/site/

I'm good, still at Newcastle uni, currently on paternity leave for my second born

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In reply to @macaronique

@macaronique Robert Recorde, in his Whetstone of Witte, coined the term 'zenzic' to mean the second power of a number. He repeated it to produce higher powers: 'zenzizenzizenzic' means the eighth power.

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @george_jessup

@george_jessup Get a strip of paper. Fold it in half. Then fold it in half again. Keep folding it in half. When you unfold it, it produces a fractal curve called the Heighway Dragon. It tiles the plane!
larryriddle.agnesscott.org/ifs/heighway/h…

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@dd4ta @wtgowers What would that involve? Do you mean an explanation of how you go from "I think this might not be provable" to "this definitely can't be proved?"

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In reply to @wtgowers

@wtgowers @dd4ta That's the page I linked to two tweets up!

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In reply to @wtgowers

@wtgowers @dd4ta I mean, it's a good page, I think it holds up to being linked twice

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In reply to @Quantum__Walker

@Meromorphic_ Yes, it's a very good movie!

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In reply to @yet_so_far

@yet_so_far Darn tootin'. It's from the biopic of Shakuntala Devi - highly recommended!

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In reply to @RogerWolff2

@RogerWolff2 The sieve of eratosthenes is a dreadfully slow means of finding prime numbers

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The "I'm feeling lucky" of twitter engagement twitter.com/RogerWolff2/st…

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In reply to @blatherwick_sam

@blatherwick_sam I've been discussing graph sketching with the @isaacphysics people, who are trying to automatically assess sketches. It's hard to pin down what a sketch of a graph is. I agree with what you said.

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In reply to @BrewEdMaths

@BrewEdMaths @woodhouse_a The pattern made by reflected light at the bottom of an empty mug is called a nephroid. It's not a cardioid, as I thought for a long time.

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Parenting first child:
CAN'T BLINK, BABY WILL DIE.

Parenting second child:
"Do you know where the baby is?"
...
"The new one."
...
"No, me neither."

29 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @aa42john

@aa42john The NHS will shortly be making that an impossibility

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In reply to @HilariousCow

@HilariousCow So that's equivalent to multiplying the rotation by itself, but the benefit of this way is that you can do fractions like 1.5 times more easily?

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October

I've always got time for a clerihew twitter.com/tentivetodetai…

2 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @wtgowers

@wtgowers I won't just say you should move to a host that does proper LaTeX, though I can help whenever you want to do that.
Until wordpress.com fixes their bug, here's a bookmarklet which replaces their images with MathJax: fix-wordpress-dot-com-maths.glitch.me

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In reply to @wtgowers

@wtgowers I'm not sure what hosts offer it, but it's a built-in feature of the WordPress software. "WordPress multisite" is the thing to search for. You want that plus the ability to add plugins, for MathJax.

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In reply to @christianp

@wtgowers What isn't always clear is that there's wordpress.com, the free service run by the company that makes WordPress the software, which is open source and can be installed and run by anyone. There are plenty of companies offering hosting for WordPress configured as you like

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @MathEdSciTech Now there's a blast from the past!

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While the baby is sleeping, I'm having fun working through the Lean natural numbers game wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/~buzzard/xena/…

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In reply to @christianp

So far, I'm repeating the background reading of the PhD I never finished. I'm glad I didn't finish, because Lean makes it superfluous

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In reply to @christianp

If anyone wants to pay me to write "Proof assistants for babies", I'm open to it

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In reply to @standupmaths

@standupmaths @stecks have you seen this anamorphic football pitch in Nantes? mateturismo.wordpress.com/2020/09/17/fey…

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In reply to @virtualcourtney

@virtualcourtney @Thalesdisciple @dzackgarza Are you getting images of maths notation to paste in to tools that don't support LaTeX? You might get on with this that I made, to do this quickly: checkmyworking.com/misc/makebigma… Just take a screenshot of the rendered maths when you're done

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Paternity leave over. Yikes!

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How do you feel about a video transcript using mathematical notation, e.g. "∑ x²" instead of "the sum of x squared"?
My hunch is that the fact notation isn't always read strictly left-to-right would make following both the video and transcript harder.

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @northumbriana

@northumbriana What was your dad doing to his suits that he needed three a year?!

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In reply to @stecks

@stecks @standupmaths ... I now have a feeling that might have been me

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In reply to @Kit_Yates_Maths

@Kit_Yates_Maths @standupmaths Oh my god, I think I know which line of the PHP config caused this.

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In reply to @Kit_Yates_Maths

@Kit_Yates_Maths my guess, knowing nothing about what happened other than the tweet you quoted, is: they set up a server to upload reports to, running a script written in PHP. The default PHP config sets a maximum size for uploaded files, to prevent errors or attacks which fill the server up.

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In reply to @christianp

@Kit_Yates_Maths The default maximum filesize is big enough that you rarely bump into it when testing, unless you have particularly good presence of mind or you've been tripped up by it before.

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In reply to @standupmaths

@standupmaths @Kit_Yates_Maths Adding a line to my professional bio:

"Unsurprising" - Matt Parker

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In reply to @standupmaths

@standupmaths @Kit_Yates_Maths

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In reply to @christianp

Time to clock off?

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@CopsAndClouds I read them all.
I sent 18 replies while I was going, and flagged 25 to look at later. I received another 15 emails while I was doing this.

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In reply to @virtualcourtney

@virtualcourtney @Thalesdisciple @dzackgarza ah!

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In reply to @JimPropp

@JimPropp I think I agree with your HR people

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In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans I think it's 'pathematical'

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In reply to @helenarney

@helenarney Helen. Friends don't tell friends about the four month sleep regression.
(Solidarity 🤜)

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You, a gentleperson of distinction: two spaces after a full stop.

This hero I'm copy-editing: at least three spaces after a full stop.

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Working on moving @NCLMathsStats's material from our private @NclNumbas database to numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk.
1729 good quality questions soon to be published! (What's interesting about that number?)

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In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson To be clear, I only use one.

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Have any universities explicitly put an upper bound on the number of Covid cases that they're willing to tolerate and continue face-to-face teaching, or have they all decided that if they don't do that they're not liable?
@NewcastleUniUCU

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In reply to @christianp

Day 2: I've cleared the backlog of emails to the @NclNumbas users group, too! I might be able to do some actual new work by the end of the week.

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In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo I can have a look tomorrow if you haven't solved it by then

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That's an odd number of rolls

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In reply to @d_yellowlees

@d_yellowlees Do you find Droid cam worthwhile? I couldn't get it to work at a decent framerate

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In reply to @d_yellowlees

@d_yellowlees ah, cool

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In reply to @Maths2014sow

@Maths2014sow Every now and then I relive the shame of my PE teacher in year 9 saying "there's 17 of you. Why's that bad, Perfect?" and not being able to answer

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In reply to @presentations

@presentations @d_yellowlees what kind of phone do you have?

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In reply to @d_yellowlees

@d_yellowlees @presentations I meant @presentations, since he seems to have a magic feature we don't!

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In reply to @d_yellowlees

@d_yellowlees @presentations that's what I suspected. I've heard iOS devices can share to macs nicely

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In reply to @joshlaison

@joshlaison YES

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In reply to @presentations

@presentations @d_yellowlees I do think this is an apple only thing support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/artic…

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In reply to @helenarney

@helenarney I had it lots when I was little. I remember it as "that fun time I stopped breathing and got to stand over the kettle" but I'm sure it was less fun for my mum

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In reply to @helenarney

@helenarney My mum combined steam with a homeopathic pill from the homeopath next door. I'm a living control group!

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I have a scratch on my monitor exactly where people's profile pictures appear in Outlook. It makes everyone look like Blofeld.
Can recommend.

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In reply to @helenarney

@helenarney trying to work out which way to round negative years is making my head hurt. I feel like if you're 0 on the day you're born, you should be -1 the day before

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People keep writing @NclNumbas in caps as NUMBAS.
Fortunately, Numbas is case-insensitive.

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In reply to @standupmaths

@standupmaths @MiniGirlGeek Would you say you have learned from exp(erience)?

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In reply to @RobertsDavidJ

@RobertsDavidJ @robeastaway @ben_nuttall A case of statutory instruments moving faster than the editing process

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In reply to @christianp

@RobertsDavidJ @robeastaway @ben_nuttall Though the maximum for a table of 6 is worth working out, if you want to give it a go

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In reply to @HilariousCow

@HilariousCow Yes Aubrey!

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What dullard called it 'remote exam invigilation' and not Proctors Without Borders?

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In reply to @HilariousCow

@HilariousCow Give it a go! They're easier than they look. The hard part is leaving them in the oven long enough so try don't collapse, but even if they do they still taste good.
I can take a photo of the recipe in my daughter's "my first cook book"

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In the list of consecutive positive base-ten integers: 1, 2, 3, the 1111111111st occurrence of 1 is the first 1 in 1111111111.

Discovered by Hans Havermann - gladhoboexpress.blogspot.com/2020/10/propor…

9 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @mathzorro

@mathzorro @aperiodical I'm going to answer for Katie and say no

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In reply to @AndreasVohns

@AndreasVohns @NclNumbas @H5PTechnology I've added a ?language parameter to the preview and embed URLs, so you can specify the language to use. For example: numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk/question/74755… is guaranteed to use German.

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In reply to @gazatron13

@gazatron13 you're right!

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!!!!! setwithfriends.com lets you change the colours !!!
There are tears in my colourblind eyes

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In reply to @samholloway

@samholloway which app is it?

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In reply to @samholloway

@samholloway are there three colours in that screenshot?

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In reply to @becky_k_warren

@becky_k_warren yes I have

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In reply to @christianp

@becky_k_warren I mean, I have no idea what they're called. The hex codes are #800080, #0AEF0D and #E66565. If I was serious I'd get some colours from colorbrewer2.org

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @howie_hua

@howie_hua How do you feel about '-x'?

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway is that because you only cut by length?

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway yes, that's what I was thinking

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA do you have a written set of rules or code of conduct for 100!?
We're setting up a similar thing, and I think it would be good to have stuff like "be nice to each other", "don't give spoilers unless asked" on record

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @mozzichi

@mozzichi @DavidKButlerUoA that's the way I was taught it in the UK, too

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA thanks!

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA do you mind if I pinch that pretty much wholesale?

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One of our PhD students has just passed their viva with no corrections.
I'm in the presence of greatness.

59 favourites 4 retweets

I thought of a brilliant, short domain-name for a self-hosted git server, but just before registering it I realised that owners of a .it domain need to be EEA citizens and I'm not sure if that'll include me after January

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @madebyburton

@madebyburton yes but l-p-g.uk doesn't work as a pun

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@mortal_ordinary The viva is the spoken exam after you've submitted your written thesis. The examinees decide whether to award your degree. Most of the time, they award it subject to corrections - fix the errors or weak bits they've spotted, and you're a doctor. This student didn't have any!

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In reply to @VickyMaths1729

@VickyMaths1729 @LPPbooks Crikey, a #BigMathOff reference on the back!

Congratulations on your new book

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge What feelings does this python code provoke in you?

max(n for n in range(100) if str(factorial(100))[-n:]=='0'*n)

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo @icecolbeveridge that was my first draft, but I thought re was a bit of a sledgehammer

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In reply to @bbarber_

@bbarber_ @icecolbeveridge Conjecture: n! does not have more than n zeros on the end.

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In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo @icecolbeveridge ahhh, I had a feeling there was a function to strip suffixes! Well done

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In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo @icecolbeveridge without strings: max(n for n in range(100) if factorial(100)%(10**n)==0)

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @ColinTheMathmo is @ColinTheMathmo's point that the question is "how many zeros on the end?" and your code doesn't do that directly, it uses a theorem which avoids writing out the zeros

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @ColinTheMathmo I was getting at that from the other direction - computing for 100 in the most brute way I could think of

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Stupid idea: record or write a proof of the same theorem every day for a month.
It's already been done in "99 variations on a proof", I suppose

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In reply to @ccppurcell

@ccppurcell Ooh, nice!

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In reply to @howie_hua

@howie_hua I don't think "simplifies to 1" is any better than "cancels to 1". "Simplify" has so many meanings

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Something that puts a chill down your spine: an email from the university's executive board that begins "The government has been clear"

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300g of sugar into Sunday morning, we've decided not to let the girl watch the Bake-Off any more

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In reply to @jemmaths

@jemmaths @MathsTechnology @onechriswhite @VMN_alex @Whitehughes @mathstiger70 @tm_maths Wikipedia says that's why τ was chosen, so no pretending necessary en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_u…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @jemmaths

@jemmaths @MathsTechnology @onechriswhite @VMN_alex @Whitehughes @mathstiger70 @tm_maths I mean, I literally just learnt it while trying to look up what gradians are, so that makes both of us

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Should it bother me that Sainsbury's obvious Penguin knock-off chocolate is called "polar bar"? They live at opposite ends of the planet!
(In case you're interested: chocolate filling fine; biscuit doesn't have quite the right texture)

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett "surely"

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Why don't any of the icon buttons in @CanvasLms have tooltips?!

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In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans Now I have "Sir, we need to reverse the polarity on the chocolate bars!" circling round my head

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gcd(0,-5) =

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In reply to @RobJLow

@RobJLow does that mean gcd(a,b)=0 for all a and b?

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"Annual leave carried over must be used by 31st September."

Ummmm

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @lukejanicke

@lukejanicke the "correct" answer was a surprise to me this morning, so I don't think there's a trick

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @jjsanderson

@jjsanderson the year of our lord two thousand and twelveteen

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In reply to @DanielTruchet

@DanielTruchet Ideally yes, but knowing the way "people services" works, they probably meant 1st October, leaving me 24 hours to use my 10 carried over days

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In reply to @lukejanicke

@lukejanicke Fair enough

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In reply to @mayhematics

@mayhematics Opinion on that differs!

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In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle @peterrowlett My firstborn is currently stuck on "three months ago" as a way of referring to any moment in the past. If she wants to be more specific, "three months ago before bad germs" or "three months ago before the baby was here"

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @GraemeBoxwell

@GraemeBoxwell Probably the same one I did.

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In reply to @apgox

@apgox I'll say what the _conventional_ answer is when the poll closes

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There's nothing like arbitrarily rebalancing scores for the Nth time to make you a believer in standards based grading.

16 favourites 2 retweets

Tom Lehrer has released all his songs into the public domain! tomlehrersongs.com

56 favourites 36 retweets

when will the emails stop aaaaaaaaaaaaa

6 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @martinjc

@martinjc @drvinceknight For quick quiz questions: could you embed a @NclNumbas question?

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In reply to @martinjc

@martinjc @drvinceknight @NclNumbas Fair enough! Keep it in mind, though - quiz questions rapidly get complicated and it's not worth reinventing the wheel.

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @profRoys

@profRoys Thinking about a socially distanced Gendarmenmarkt has been making me sad all year, so I'm glad it's not happening

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What's the most interesting integer sequence that only uses the numbers 1 to 5?

15 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @GhostMutt

@GhostMutt oeis.org, I suppose

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In reply to @Whitehughes

@Whitehughes integers 1 to 5

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In reply to @mathforge

@mathforge @matthewhaworth them's fighting words!

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @ZenoRogue

@ZenoRogue My friend, you clearly haven't seen 1,2,3,4,5

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In reply to @Whitehughes

@Whitehughes Well, it's in the OEIS, but nobody has felt moved to write any interesting comments on it: oeis.org/A039703

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tfw just anybody can name someone else the world's most interesting mathematician and kids believe them twitter.com/MissB_Williams…

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge so you're saying I need to start accepting bribes?

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In reply to @Quelklef

@Quelklef I had that in mind, which is why I didn't include 0

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In reply to @Quelklef

@Quelklef Yeah, fair enough. I suppose I want something with more than 2 distinct elements

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In reply to @kyledevans

@kyledevans That's weird, it's also my mother's maiden name!

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Galaxy brain twitter.com/Oktahedro/stat…

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In reply to @neil_calkin

@neil_calkin @Quelklef I do! Lovely sequence.
This was prompted by me thinking that there's a huge gulf between binary-ish sequences that only use 0 and 1 or 1 and 2, and others with much bigger range. I should have asked for sequences with between 3 and 5 distinct elements.

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In reply to @christianp

@neil_calkin @Quelklef Hmm.. The Wikipedia illustration for the Calkin-Wilf tree only uses the numbers 1 to 5 😉

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Kit_Yates_Maths

@Kit_Yates_Maths "Call My Bluff Routine"

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In reply to @christianp

the first sequence in the OEIS with 5 distinct values in its a-file (but more in the whole sequence) is oeis.org/A000091. If you can work out what it's about, please enlighten me

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In reply to @christianp

The first sequence just using the numbers 1,2,3,4,5 in its a-file is oeis.org/A007001, which combines a nice entry number with a charming simplicity.
Novelty: 4/5
Aesthetics: 5/5
Explicability: 3/5 ("orbit"??)
Completeness: 5/5

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It's value added publishing time again!
See if you can beat the full minute it took me to work out how to read this article. Where on this page did I have to click?
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston yes. I foolishly expected a link to read the article after the abstract, and then I was misled by the "get rights and content" link, along with "open archive".

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @JSEllenberg

@JSEllenberg Draw the monkey first, then the pringle, then erase the monkey

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Monday morning. 62 unread emails in my inbox.

Why have I been having stress dreams?

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It's "tell me not to use ambiguous notation" time!
Context: I have to interpret students' ambiguous notation.

I want to interpret `xy` as `x*y`.
Should `x/yz` be `(x/y)*z` or `x/(y*z)`?

Yes, it's ambiguous, but of the two options, which would be the least surprising?

9 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @AndreasVohns

@AndreasVohns @NclNumbas Bitte darf ich über diese Fragen im Numbas-blog schreiben?

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In reply to @mathforge

@mathforge Both those cases match the behaviour I currently have, so I'm glad we agree

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @SdixonSharon

@SdixonSharon You can follow the order of operations for x/y+z. Do you think there's another way of interpreting it?

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In reply to @christianp

... now I have vague memories of seeing a comment along the lines of "juxtaposition binds more tightly than operator symbols" somewhere in someone else's code

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In reply to @knightofmaths

@knightofmaths as typed on a keyboard, so the four characters x/yz

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In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston so how would you interpret it?

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In reply to @christianp

Really annoying follow-up:

Is `xy!` equivalent to `(x*y)!` or `x*(y!)` ?

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In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston The reason I'm thinking about this is that you might type something like `xy^2` to mean `x*y^2`.
I think in that case the juxtaposition doesn't bind more tightly - the exponentiation should happen first. Maybe juxtaposition is a way of breaking ties for ops with equal precedence?

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In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston I'll... inform my colleague who just wrote xy^2 that they're in the wrong timeline

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In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston yes, this is for my job writing e-assessment software.

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In reply to @peterrowlett

@peterrowlett @icecolbeveridge Yeah, they get a live 2D rendering so *in theory* they can check it's been interpreted as they intended.

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In reply to @Sally_Keely

@Sally_Keely That's true if you apply the normal order of operations after inserting the missing multiplication symbol, but most people replying interpret x/yz as x/(y*z). I think the intuition is that juxtaposition is a bit stronger than using the * symbol

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In reply to @virtualcourtney

@virtualcourtney @Sally_Keely I think this is a prescriptivist/descriptivist argument.

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In reply to @christianp

Is now a good time to link to the thing I made that lets you make up your own order of operations? checkmyworking.com/misc/samdob/

4 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @virtualcourtney

@virtualcourtney @Sally_Keely well, people wrote prescriptive rules saying you shouldn't split an infinitive or end a sentence with a preposition, but that's something up with which many people will not put

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In reply to @bwebste

@bwebste @pkrautz Does this work when you replace letters with numbers, or are there different rules?

How do you feel about:
x/2z
3/4z
1/yz

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In reply to @virtualcourtney

@virtualcourtney @Sally_Keely I suppose I'm willing to go with "the rules are wrong", based on how people use this notation in practice

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I'm getting some very authoritative answers in both directions to this. twitter.com/christianp/sta…

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In reply to @bwebste

@bwebste @pkrautz so 3/4z is 3/(4*z)?

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In reply to @virtualcourtney

@virtualcourtney @Sally_Keely I have yet to encounter a situation where adding parentheses made things worse

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I promise I'm not just coming up with these to troll you:

What information is lost when you consider 100% of 0 as identical to 0% of 0?

(This question brought to you by a colleague's Canvas quiz progression that didn't seem to be working)

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In reply to @DavidKButlerUoA

@DavidKButlerUoA Powers. The following are all considered the same: I for Indices, E for Exponents, O for Ordinals

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In reply to @christianp

@DavidKButlerUoA I've just googled it, and apparently O is for "Orders" and I've misremembered it my whole life

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🎶 Let's get farty and have a farty party 🎉

(babies are magic and I cherish every moment)

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Friendship with farting is over.
Now snoring is my friend.

1 favourite 0 retweets

Achievement: introduced a southerner to the word 'hoy', as in "I'll just hoy together some questions"

5 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared I can't account for what they get up to in Hartlepool

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Clare_L_Wallace

@Clare_L_Wallace @honeypisquared kets?

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In reply to @Clare_L_Wallace

@Clare_L_Wallace @honeypisquared sorry, I don't do Durham. Too far south for me ;)

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@Clare_L_Wallace @honeypisquared Who am I kidding? As if I didn't grow up within shouting distance of the River Wear...

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @MathigonOrg

@MathigonOrg having read "Inventing the Mathematician", I think it would be better if you made mathematical topics more prominent in the timeline than people

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All of you insisting that `a⁡(b+1)` must be interpreted as a function application because it doesnt have a multiplication symbol, as if the unicode character U+2061 FUNCTION APPLICATION doesn't exist

10 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @christianp

It looks like this: ⁡
I can tell when it's missing.

6 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@MathigonOrg and the list of non-mathematical events at the bottom is very eurocentric

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This is the content I come to this website for twitter.com/ZenoRogue/stat…

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Cshearer41

@Cshearer41 Is the bottom-right triangle yellow, and the other two orange?

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @howie_hua

@howie_hua Ah yes, flippered learning

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @alephJamesA

@alephJamesA @24hmaths Well done! I watched it with the baby on my lap. He wanted more magic involving things disappearing and reappearing, but otherwise gave it a good review

1 favourite 0 retweets

I can only work 80% of full time because I'm disabled. I'm also limited in what I can do when I'm at work, which has limited my career options. twitter.com/UCUequality/st…

7 favourites 0 retweets

November

Does this function have a name?
For a, b > 0, max(a/b, b/a)

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @MB_Whitworth

@MB_Whitworth Yes. Does it have a short name, like 'abs' for 'absolute value'?

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Why has the wordpress editor replaced the list of sensible image sizes with a series of buttons to pick a scale factor for the source image? I don't care what 50% of my original image is, I want to make it the same size as all the others in the page!

2 favourites 0 retweets

I'm up for calling it 'squareness'. (And yes, on reflection, min is more useful than max) twitter.com/mayhematics/st…

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @AnonMathMom

@AnonMathMom So is your little one as pedantic as mine is?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Pyfagorass

@Pyfagorass Coming into this without any context: is Galen Druke the name of a character from Star Wars?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron Eventually it'll have replied to everyone, so its output will follow a logistic curve. As I show in my viXra paper, this means ...

1 favourite 0 retweets

Student asking for altercations following their homework submission.

If it's an altercation they want...

11 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @alisonkiddle

@alisonkiddle @Dragon_Dodo Have you got a Big Knife? I was terrible at cutting things and then I got a Big Knife and it became loads easier. I think the diff is you can use more of the knuckles on your off hand to lean the knife against

1 favourite 0 retweets

Can't believe it's 2020 and I'm debugging an internet explorer compatibility problem

7 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @bourne_2_learn

@bourne_2_learn brb, emailing several hundred thousand students around the world

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In reply to @christianp

Victory! A tale in 12 tabs

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Coworker has arrived to ceremonially close IE for another year

9 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Shona_Mu

@Shona_Mu (I'm autistic but not ADHD)

I also have trouble understanding mindfulness. I think I'm quite mindful anyway? Sorry I don't have any great insight for you, but it's not just you who doesn't understand.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @bourne_2_learn

@bourne_2_learn it was a flippant comment. I have no way of knowing exactly who is using Numbas, or which browser they're using

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In reply to @christianp

Now a student wants to know if someone can reprimand the problem they're having.

If it's a reprimand they want...

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @TamasGorbe

@TamasGorbe @roger_mansuy ... how often did he have cause to say that?

5 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @ptwiddle

@ptwiddle @TamasGorbe @roger_mansuy Good point!

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Kit_Yates_Maths

@Kit_Yates_Maths Finally, it's worth knowing about random walks!

1 favourite 0 retweets

N=33, but this is a hilarious experiment twitter.com/tomstafford/st…

6 favourites 3 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Today, a student asking how to combat a problem.

If it's combat they want...

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @HilariousCow

@HilariousCow In this analogy, which one is like People Like Us?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @HilariousCow

@HilariousCow Don't apologise, I have no idea what either of those US programmes is about

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Currently running a severe spoons deficit

5 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @suedepom

@suedepom thebraincharity.org.uk/whats-on/news/…

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In reply to @christianp

In happier news, I've just received a letter referring me for an appointment with "Elderly Care", so things are looking up

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @MathsTeacherKYP

@MathsTeacherKYP ???

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In reply to @MathsTeacherKYP

@MathsTeacherKYP I have, but I didn't get that that was what you meant

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How time has been passing this week twitter.com/christianp/sta…

17 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron Depends on how sorry you are about all the people your grandad killed, I suppose

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Just encountered a really weird firefox bug (I think) where window.setTimeout just never ran

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I'm enjoying seeing a lot of people who'd never crossed my timeline before on #BlackInMathWeek

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oeiswhack: enter a short, meaningful, sequence of integers into oeis.org, returning no results.

I think this is probably the best oeiswhack I'm ever going to get

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In reply to @christianp

Here's what it means:

I have a process that begins by picking a number N, and totting up a total T that begins at 0.
Repeatedly do this:

* add N to T
* if N divides T, add 1 to N, otherwise subtract 1
* if N is 1, stop

I searched for N where the process stops

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In reply to @TimonGutleb

@TimonGutleb yeah, I'm going to. I've just sent an email to seqfans asking for help making up the short description, because I'm never happy with those

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@TimonGutleb I had a go: oeis.org/draft/A338807 🤷

1 favourite 0 retweets

Rookie mistake by this correspondent: mentioned that their problem needs to be resolved by January 2021.

Anything later than three months ago is going to the bottom of the pile

5 favourites 1 retweet

3-year-old told me that she got a sticker at playgroup for staying quiet while they thought about puppies this morning.

Something's been lost along the way there...

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In reply to @robeastaway

@robeastaway @aperiodical you nearly nerdsniped me last time to rank league seasons by closeness of the goal/match ratio to π, and I *really* don't have time to do it now, but ...

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@robeastaway did you spot that in the 15/16 season there were 22 goals after 7 matches? That's the best π approximation in the last 10 years

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In reply to @christianp

@robeastaway and in 2012/13 there were 44 goals after 14 matches

1 favourite 0 retweets

Oh wow, brutalism makes so much more sense when you realise photos at the time were almost all black and white! twitter.com/ZndrP/status/1…

1 favourite 0 retweets

I have another question about notation. I'll give the question, then please like each of the tweets in the thread with a notation that you'd accept.

Context: an online homework. Text shortened: it's not really about fractions.

Divide -5 by -55. Give your answer as a fraction.

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In reply to @christianp

-5/-55

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In reply to @christianp

5/55

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In reply to @christianp

1/11

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In reply to @christianp

and why the heck not:
−5 ÷ −55

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In reply to @christianp

(-5)/(-55)

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In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner yeah, they're all unambiguous, but I wonder how far down the hole of unusual notations I need to go. Like, arbitrarily nested brackets are unambiguous, but I think it's fair to say a rational number doesn't need any brackets in it

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner sorry, I can't see the difference you mean

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In reply to @BernhardWerner

@BernhardWerner I thought I was...

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In reply to @christianp

(1/11)

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In reply to @christianp

1.0/11.0

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In reply to @christianp

2/22

6 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @stem_wales

@stem_wales no, just interested in the value, and the form doesn't matter at all - we just specified a fraction so we don't have to deal with recurring decimals

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@DH_Seifert you'd really accept this one?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @SamHartburn

@SamHartburn @panlepan @mathhombre @geogebra ffmpeg can probably do what you want

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @RichardElwes

@RichardElwes Have you got the book "Magnificent Mistakes in Mathematics"?

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @alexbellos

@alexbellos if you'd said 4 letters, I could've sent you this classic of constrained writing: muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/…

But you did not so I am sad

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @mathforge

@mathforge @virtualcourtney alas, I am middle class and have parents from Slough, so my accent is distressingly non-provincial

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @statto

@statto I had a bit of a freak out last night about what's going on in a single drop of water, so no thanks

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @d_yellowlees

@d_yellowlees does "I've given this sort of talk dozens of times" count as presentation prep? Asking for someone who has a talk to give on Friday morning

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @dcsohl

@dcsohl @Hros @standupmaths @MathsJam 2021-08-(4!)

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In reply to @standupmaths

@standupmaths @honeypisquared Project: count the women contributors to the OEIS

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @knowledgehook

@knowledgehook @MathforLove @theresawills Will you be doing anything to make this accessible to colourblind users?

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @MathforLove

@MathforLove @knowledgehook @theresawills Why not make it the standard visualization?

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Is it just me or is this graph sad?

20 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @KohoutJW

@KohoutJW Oh no I've failed a Rorschach test of my own making

5 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @knowledgehook

@knowledgehook @MathforLove @theresawills Yes!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @C_J_Smith

@C_J_Smith Now I need to update my definitions of 'top' and 'bottom'

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math Make up a new one!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @k_houston_math

@k_houston_math That's one example of a new task to make up

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Those interested in such things might want to know that aldi and amazon are selling geomag very cheaply at the moment

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Pyfagorass

@Pyfagorass Making a note to find you in 2025 when nihilism is the greatest threat facing humanity

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There's encouraging women to study technical subjects, and then there's making it look like you're an all-women's institution, TU Dublin.

On reloading the page I get shown a different image at the top, with a bit more diversity. Let's blame the algorithms!

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In reply to @FOTSN

@FOTSN @stecks every time I take that tote out I feel like I'm living a lie. I feel like writing "(but I much prefer a Python notebook)" on the other side

3 favourites 0 retweets

FAO @FOTSN I've found the title of your next show twitter.com/HaggardHawks/s…

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @mathhombre

@mathhombre "first day you enjoy hearing Christmas music" might be better

0 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @LearningMaths

@LearningMaths I love this!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs @chalkdustmag Squolaf!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@mscroggs @chalkdustmag can I be petty and say that the dots should be in different places for each norm?

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@LearningMaths I've made a @NclNumbas explore mode question of this: numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk/question/81628…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @ColinTheMathmo

@ColinTheMathmo @Gelada I am available to make interactive computer based activities

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In reply to @AndreasVohns

@AndreasVohns You could try doing a different tie knot each time: arxiv.org/abs/1401.8242

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK sorry, you're in tier -1. You must go outside

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In reply to @stecks

@stecks A classic

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In reply to @krzhang

@krzhang @genebkim @SherlockpHolmes @monsoon0 Hah, I was just about to say constructivists are trolls and then this reply popped up.

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @tomrocksmaths

@tomrocksmaths lovely pictures. I was going to say they're giving @benorlin a run for his money, but they're too good for that

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I'm grateful for @jamesgrime's continued patronage of my interactive-maths-thingy-making skills. Just made him a lovely, accessible, graph theory toy.

If you're going to run a maths workshop and need an interactive thingy, I might be able to help.

13 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

@jamesgrime See it this weekend:
twitter.com/jamesgrime/sta…

2 favourites 0 retweets

I'm just getting sad clown vibes from this twitter.com/MathArt4All/st…

6 favourites 0 retweets

Yes, this. twitter.com/BendyBotanist/…

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When a recipe says 'doubled in size', does it usually mean 'doubled in diameter' or 'doubled in volume'?

2 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge I suppose I should look in either "The Proof is in the Pudding" or Eugenia Chengs's baking book

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In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge Have you got Nikki Segnit's "Lateral Cooking"? It is _very_ mathematician friendly

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @C_J_Smith

@C_J_Smith can I live at your house? Here I just have to play the Orchard Games pizza game over and over and over and over

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@FoxtrotRomeo130 A rising dough doesn't double in mass

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge 7-year-old might be just the right age to start Redwall

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @lunasorcery

@lunasorcery Seeing Luna's last tweet of the night at the top of my timeline each morning when I wake up

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @lunasorcery

@lunasorcery I'd like to join the chorus of people asking why you make life so hard for yourself

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Your best guesses about what the job title "Solution Architect" entails, please.

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @honkjhonk

@honkjhonk I'm fortunate to live in a jurisdiction where such reasonable rules don't exist

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In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron The Gömböc is patented, isn't it?

1 favourite 0 retweets

December

Today: lots and lots of testing of @NclNumbas questions. It's a bit mind-blowing how many people are using it

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In reply to @christianp

@NclNumbas just over 1400 questions edited this week! Wow!

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I've just learnt that there is an ANSI escape code to render characters in Fraktur!
fau.re/blog/20140406_…

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I've got a new sequence in the OEIS. It's to do with a really simple number game I made up. Here's a video explaining the rules
youtube.com/watch?v=ZtGcd0…

9 favourites 2 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Which starting numbers eventually get to 1? In the video, it looks like starting at 4 doesn't, but starting at 2 does.

My new sequence, oeis.org/A338807, lists the numbers that eventually reach 1. I'd love to know if there's a pattern!

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Think of a number, and keep a running total starting at 0. Each turn, add your number on to the total. Then, if the old total was a multiple of your number, add one to your number. Otherwise, subtract 1.
The game ends when your number is 1.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

You could think of this game as "the Collatz sequence with a running total" - what happens next doesn't just depend on which number you're on now, it also depends on all the numbers you've seen before.

3 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @christianp

(my enemies might like to look at the editing history of the OEIS entry to see what a mare I had trying to compute it correctly and then format it properly)

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In reply to @BEBischof

@BEBischof nope

1 favourite 0 retweets

What's not in an encyclopedia?

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In reply to @christianp

Wikipedia: all the right facts, not necessarily in the right order

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In reply to @BEBischof

@BEBischof yeah, I think so: call your number at step i N_i, and the total T_i. Consider the set of triples (N_i, N_j, T_i mod N_j) for all j<=i. If at some step all those triples are ones you've seen before, nothing new is going to happen so you'll never reach N = 1

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @sarahlovesmaths

@sarahlovesmaths This exact question was answered by @CardColm in 2012 on @aperiodical: aperiodical.com/2012/05/in-wha…

2 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @CardColm

@CardColm @aperiodical that sounds plausible

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In reply to @nicole_cozens

@nicole_cozens @AJMagicMessage Replace "what are the boys' ages" with "what could the boys' ages be?" and you've got one of those new-fangled open questions

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @chris_fairless

@chris_fairless Is that a mean or a median or what?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge What's your preferred method for finding a cross product?

0 favourites 0 retweets

Got ready for a bike ride but discovered a flat tyre. Now walking but directing envious glowers at every cyclist who crosses my path

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @JanvierUK

@JanvierUK @DailyMirror A charitable reading is that it's a typo and they meant 'catches'

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @alephJamesA

@alephJamesA @icecolbeveridge *cracks fingers*
Time for a professional to show you how to _really_ not get it

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @icecolbeveridge

@icecolbeveridge @alephJamesA Just had a look at it. Rewriting rules! that's where I'm a viking!

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@icecolbeveridge @alephJamesA Dang, it was just a DAG

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Thomaths2

@Thomaths2 @roger_mansuy est-ce que vous avez vu les polices des frères Demaine? erikdemaine.org/fonts/

5 favourites 1 retweet

I've thought of an interesting, easily explained maths thing and I don't know whether to do something about it now, or save it for next year's #BigMathOff or #BigMathsJam.

6 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron crikey, there's a blast from the past. I think about that bit every now and then, and the bit with the 'surreal' comedian who just compares everything to lemurs

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @Andrew_Taylor

@Andrew_Taylor What is this, noto for concepts that need to be represented pictorially?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @mgt_grunthos

@mgt_grunthos @KloKlo @Josh_More @kizzyblackburn We go even further and say D'hams, pronounced 'Darms'

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @fermatslibrary

@fermatslibrary I want 1 to appear either twice or not at all, but just once there looks weird

36 favourites 0 retweets

I dreamt a joke so mediocre it woke me up:

"I have a gymnast friend who wrongfully had his medals taken away. I'm helping him win them back, but we've got to jump through a lot of hoops."

17 favourites 1 retweet

In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron Maybe the other half are unemployed?

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron Rats

1 favourite 0 retweets

I'd forgotten how comfy my Christmas jumper is. Why don't I wear it all year?

11 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @Ayliean

@Ayliean Lovely!

1 favourite 0 retweets

Beautiful twitter.com/UKMetric/statu…

5 favourites 0 retweets

What's this a drawing of?

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

So a(5) = 2 because it doesn't appear in column 2, which is 1,3,6,10,...

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In reply to @christianp

The columns of Pascal's triangle are

1,1,1,1,...
1,2,3,4,...
1,3,6,10,...
1,4,10,20,...
...

1 favourite 0 retweets

Can someone save my sanity: I can't believe this isn't in the OEIS, I must have made a mistake.

"a(n) = the first column of Pascal's triangle in which n does not appear".

Labelling the first column 0 and starting at n=2, I get
2,3,2,2,3,2,2,2,4,2,2,2,2,3,2,2,2,2,2,3,2,2,2,2,...

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @stecks

@stecks OK, ignoring column 0

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In reply to @Derektionary

@Derektionary Umm,... Yes

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It's "arbitrarily change the marks available for questions until they add up to the magic number" season again.

But mastery grading is so subjective...

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

It's also "I've helpfully highlighted my changes in red" season.

@colourblindorg

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @blitzmunter

@blitzmunter The dialog is provided by the browser, so you can't style it

1 favourite 0 retweets

Wanted: a function that takes a description of a family relation and returns the number of different paths in the family tree it could describe (considering siblings with the same parents as equivalent)

2 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @honeypisquared

@honeypisquared Entropy!
When a thing falls down and it makes you frown,
It's entropy!
When you're out of luck and it comes unstuck,
It's a sad day.
It always increases, goes only one way

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @sarahlovesmaths

@sarahlovesmaths good question

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Very frustrated with the number of people, both students and colleagues, who email me saying "there's a problem with my test" without giving any hint about which test it is.
There were 138 @NclNumbas tests active yesterday, at Newcastle alone!

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@NclNumbas Fortunately, I'm a powerful wizard and can divine which test they're talking about with a combination of spells and database queries, but I'm not happy when I do it

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Weird: the python datetime library can make a datetime for 1st January 1AD, but can't produce its unix timestamp:

> datetime(1,1,1,0).timestamp()
ValueError: year 0 is out of range

> datetime(1,1,2,0).timestamp()
-62135510325.0

3 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @TimonGutleb

@TimonGutleb I think the last comment in that thread explains what I saw, since I'm in GMT.

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @theFoldster

@theFoldster @matthematician tell that to all the people whose discoveries were named after somebody else

14 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @robinhouston

@robinhouston this tweet is a denial of service attack on my brain

4 favourites 0 retweets

I'd been wondering if duolingo mare sure that the parts of phrases were presented in a derangement. Now I know!

4 favourites 0 retweets

I haven't enjoyed it in previous years, but I'm actually keeping up with this year's #AdventOfCode. Either the puzzles are a lot easier or I've got cleverer. One of those is much more likely

5 favourites 0 retweets

Does this exist: Euclid's Elements, in origami.
All the propositions would need reworking to cover the stuff you can do with folds instead of straightedge and compass.

10 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @chesstutor

@chesstutor @mayhematics thanks! I found a copy I can read at jstor.org/stable/3607531

0 favourites 0 retweets

Thinking again about that year the Dutch government handled everything so badly that their citizens ate them

6 favourites 3 retweets

In reply to @Htbaa

@Htbaa en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampjaar

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @alicecbennett

@alicecbennett It would be so much less effort on their part to just make everyone answer that question. Pure aggravation!

0 favourites 0 retweets

The recipe says to use 2 cloves of garlic, but it's on the sainsbury's website so I'll use 6

9 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

Step 3 of this recipe is something I should have started doing before steps 1 and 2, so joke's on me I suppose.

Well played, anonymous recipe author. Well played.

4 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @tombutton

@tombutton Correct

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @mscroggs

@mscroggs Hahaha fun joke I'm going to bed at 8

5 favourites 0 retweets

Just in case you were wondering who the Queen of Wrapping is, @stecks has wrapped an individual pencil with remarkable precision

11 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @jjaron

@jjaron Crikey, well done! Hope you feel better soon

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @alephJamesA

@alephJamesA I remember being told how to do this in physics class, thinking "that's cool", then not doing it. That's why I'm a pure mathematician

6 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @edsouthall

@edsouthall At this time of year, we should all take a moment to think about our role in triangle inequality

3 favourites 1 retweet

I think @matheknitician will like this twitter.com/obi_obita/stat…

1 favourite 0 retweets

In reply to @matheknitician

@matheknitician I think side-on, and you change colour for each layer

0 favourites 0 retweets

In reply to @christianp

@matheknitician No, that's not it. I've got no clue, I can't even see what the colours are

1 favourite 0 retweets

My 3-year-old would like to know what winter looks like around the world. Could you reply with a photo of what it looks like near you at the moment?

Here's what it looks like near us.

32 favourites 3 retweets

This film is loads of fun. If you can, I highly recommend you watch it twitter.com/aperiodical/st…

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In reply to @christianp

Thanks for your photos, everyone! I made the same request on mastodon and got loads more photos.
If you'd like to see them, the thread is at mathstodon.xyz/@christianp/10…

1 favourite 1 retweet

In reply to @esdaniel

@esdaniel Yikes!

0 favourites 0 retweets

Toddler is playing Toca World on the ipad, in the pretend vet's practice.
"I don't like that animal."
Picks up an axolotl and puts it in the bin.
Sorry, @helenarney.