Pinned toot

You, a tech startup with millions in angel finance: made an app to turn handwritten maths into TeX.

Me, just the worst kind of smart alec: convinced a pen to turn TeX into handwritten maths

Water,
Life-giving water!

Miracle molecule,
Medium of all that matters

Seeping through my ceiling

Helping mould grow

Annoying me

Personal health

Compression stockings, day 1: I can't believe what a difference they've made! I haven't lost my vision once, and this morning I hoovered both upstairs and down without collapsing.
Can't shake the feeling I'm in Rocky Horror though

The hard part: some of these fellas have lots of hands!

That feeling when you model compassionate response to a student in an email with a colleague CCed in, and then you see the colleague doing the same in an email to another student 🥰

Empty brain: not documenting your code.

Full brain: documenting your code after you write

Galaxy brain: documenting code you haven't written yet

(today I am submitting lots of bug reports saying "why does thing mentioned in the docs not actually exist?)

A quick round-up of three recent Wikipedia Good Articles:

Factorial, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoria – you know, $$n!$$.

Jessen's icosahedron, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessen%2 – polyhedron with all-right dihedrals despite not having axis-parallel sides; the shape of the "Skwish" tensegrity

Erdős–Straus conjecture, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%9 – the question of whether $$\frac{4}{n}=\frac{1}{x}+\frac{1}{y}+\frac{1}{z}$$ has positive integer solutions for all $$n>1$$

The term `angle' in the international system of units
Article by Michael P. Krystek
In collections: History, Notation and conventions
The concept of an angle is one that often causes difficulties in metrology. These are partly caused by a confusing mixture of several mathematical terms, partly by real mathematical difficulties and finally by imprecise terminology. The purpose of this publication is to...
URL: arxiv.org/abs/2101.01023v2
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2101.01023v2

Find out how good you are at placing historical events in the right order with this cool new game based on Wikidata's data:

wikitrivia.tomjwatson.com/

This is awesome!

@christianp I notice you are now square, triangular, and Kryptonic.

Have a good one.

Outlook: It Sort Of Works™

I've written a Python script to synchronise a folder on your PC with a Canvas LMS course's files section.

pypi.org/project/canvaslms-syn

covid

ahhh, rats. A confirmed covid case in my daughter's class, the day before my birthday!

Mean Girls was affected by outliers; Median Girls is probably more representative of the typical clique

- can you explain this 2 years gap in your resume?
- i was setting a custom font with LateX on the said resume

Do I know any mathematicians who use British Sign Language?
I'd like to put together an event with some training on basic BSL for maths, and maybe one or two talks about doing maths while Deaf/deaf.

I have a budget.

At David Butler's One Hundred Factorial last week, I played a nice space-claiming game.
I was inspired to make a computery version. I've called it "This island is big enough for the both of us"
Play at somethingorotherwhatever.com/t

Word calculus in the fundamental group of the Menger curve
Article by Hanspeter Fischer and Andreas Zastrow
In collections: Combinatorics, Fun maths facts, Games to play with friends, The groups group
The fundamental group of the Menger universal curve is uncountable and not free, although all of its finitely generated subgroups are free. It contains an isomorphic copy of the fundamental group of every...
URL: arxiv.org/abs/1310.7968v1
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/1310.7968v1

Does mathstodon have any content rules about improperly using arithmetic?

The Fastest and Shortest Algorithm for All Well-Defined Problems
Article by Hutter, Marcus
In collections: Attention-grabbing titles, Basically computer science
An algorithm M is described that solves any well-defined problem p as quickly as the fastest algorithm computing a solution to p, save for a factor of 5 and low-order additive terms. M optimally distributes resources between the execution of...
URL: hutter1.net/ai/pfastprg.htm
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0206022.pdf