Double Maths First Thing: Issue 62

Double Maths First Thing doesn’t fear the REAPER Hello! My name is Colin and I am a mathematician on a mission to spread mathematical joy and surprise. This week is full of leavers’ assemblies and general end-of-term commitments, so you’ll forgive me for keeping it brief. Links Let’s start at EMF, which (for various good reasons) is not my cup of tea, but might well be yours – especially if you revel in things like Ayliean spending five hours doing 14 levels of a Tower of Hanoi. It always surprises me that it’s not a very old puzzle, it was invented by Lucas and written up in Récréations mathématiques. (Incidentally, if anyone wants to fund a translation of Rec Math into English, let me know! That’s my sort of project.) Dear friend Alison Kiddle spoke about the maths of knitting. Robin Houston and pals made a Large Object. Speaking of Robin, he pointed me at an AI-generated counterexample to an open conjecture. There seems to be some dispute about how surprising or important it is,…