Pinned toot

Hallo, new Mastodon users! Here on mathstodon.xyz we've got a couple of mathematical emoji: and . I'd love to add some more. If you can make a PNG image the same size as those, send it to me and I'll add it. Faces of famous mathematicians are an easy place to start; could we have some shapes, polyhedra, or other mathographics too?

lots of people discussing cultural norms without defining their cultural vector space

Just discovered that guards on Royal Mail coaches used to be armed with blunderbusses (postalmuseum.org/blog/arming-t)
Time for that gritty Postman Pat reboot

Went out to Tynemouth on Saturday.

I've made a new thing. I've called it "The Homologist's Nightmare".
homologists-nightmare.glitch.m

I'm testing something with a screen reader on linux, which means I'm using Orca. God help me. At least it works in firefox (finally!), but I can't work out how to get Orca to read out its own help page!

the American Mathematical Society just published a free ebook called Living Proof, a collection of mathematicians recounting their often turbulent paths to where they are now. i've read a few of the stories and i think this is an amazing read, not just for scholars of math, but for anyone who is doing something where they simply don't feel "smart enough" to succeed. success is often made up of struggle and failure; this can be difficult to remember in our current times.

Writing code in Ruby is really making me appreciate Python

I didn't know that Philip Glass had composed a piece of music for Sesame Street, and its about geometry!

My quest to update everything to use MathJax v3 continues.
I've rewritten my MathJax patch for mastodon to use v3.
Here's the new code: github.com/christianp/mastodon
(now running on mathstodon.xyz!)

Mathematical WordPress users: today I updated the Simple MathJax plugin to support @MathJax v3: wordpress.org/plugins/simple-m
Getting the latest maths typesetting is as easy as picking version 3 from the settings page!

I'm catching up on , and I'm enjoying this Math Horizons article by @jsiehler about Port-and-Sweep solitaire: homepages.gac.edu/~jsiehler/Ar

If you want a gentle way to explore programming and #3DPrinting in a block-style GUI, consider taking a look at blockscad3d.com/editor/

You do not need to create an account to try it out, but you will need to export files to your own computer without an account.

If you have heard of Scratch or Blockly, this overlay for OpenSCAD is like that.

here's an excellent picture to illustrate

these cars both appear black. but under sunlight one of them is actually red. they both appear black because the sodium vapour lamps that they're being illuminated emit light at a very narrow range of wavelengths, and it just so happens that the red pigment on the car absorbs those wavelengths. even though orange is traditionally considered a "combination of red and green", this kind of orange causes a red object to appear black. ain't that cool?

mathstodon.xyz is now running Mastodon 3.0.0.
Major changes are described at github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/

It worked!
For other people running my MathJax patch, here's a commit that adds MathJax (and the plaintext TeX → unicode auto-replacement) into Mastodon 3.0.0: github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/

π = $$\frac{22}{7}$$

Going to start updating mathstodon.xyz to Mastodon 3.0.0. Hopefully it'll all go smoothly

I took a couple pages from an analysis book for the next of my A-to-Z essays: the Infimum.

nebusresearch.wordpress.com/20

me doing math and not worrying about when it's due: haha love to learn about these funky little numbers
me when i remember the deadlines: ah fuck the numbers contain depression

A Mastodon instance for maths people. The kind of people who make $$\pi z^2 \times a$$ jokes. Use $$ and $$ for inline LaTeX, and $ and $ for display mode.