Double Maths First Thing: Issue 56

Double Maths First Thing no longer runs marathons. Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight of doing maths, figuring things out and generally taking pleasure in doing clever things. Like everyone else, I was thrilled to see Sabastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha break the two-hour barrier in the London Marathon this weekend. I was thrilled enough to break the five-hour barrier a decade ago in Manchester, and have dreams of a two-hour half-marathon at some distant future point. I wouldn’t normally link to an ad, but here are some regular people trying to run at two-hour-marathon pace – for comparison, the course record at Weymouth Parkrun is 14:47. Sawe’s effort is roughly equivalent to beating that by 40 seconds, then running seven and a half more parkruns at the same pace. Meanwhile, the maths community’s own Mats Vermeeren ran a very creditable 3:06 (a parkrun-equivalent of 22 minutes) and Hari from Maths City Leeds ran the distance in…