Double Maths First Thing: Issue 5B

Double Maths First Thing doesn’t know where to start Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread the joy and delight that comes from working things through and wrapping them up with a neat mathematical bow. Before anything else, a quick correction: last time out I credited Kate Holmes with the escape rooms rather than Kate Farrell. Apologies to both. Over half term, I spent a few days in Kent, visiting Rochester Guildhall Museum and Hever Castle, most of which time I spent making “then I saw her face, now Anne Boleyn, Hever” jokes that don’t quite work. (Liked the water maze, though.) Slightly annoyingly, both places had some missed opportunities for maths exploration. Links Maths in museums, you say? Tom Briggs has a piece about that. I feel like it understates just how awful one of the graphs is. A quick literature review of the week: Jonathan Gratus doing differential geometry in pictures (arXiv), Petra Schwer on what it means to do maths (arXiv),…