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I teach university mathematics (modelling, combinatorics, game theory, history, programming) in the UK. I also research university-level educational practice. Recent papers including teaching programming, automated assessment & play and problem-solving: peterrowlett.net/publications

I'm one of the editors at @aperiodical.

I'm a Vice President of ima.org.uk/

I co-host a podcast Mathematical Objects with @stecks aperiodical.com/podcasts/mathe

Out of spa—

Because I seem to be making a hobby of tinkering with TikZ this summer, I released an update to the nimsticks LaTeX package for multi-pile Nim - now with customisation options for size & colour, and you can use your own drawings rather than my sticks.

I made a new LaTeX package for drawing dice, customdice.

The basic commands include \dice{5} for a standard dice face, and \textdice{A} for a face with letter A. You can customise the colours and size, and what’s written on the faces can be (in principle) any LaTeX code or TikZ code.

More information and how to get it in this blog post: aperiodical.com/2022/08/custom

Official customdice page on CTAN: ctan.org/pkg/customdice

My son told me he can make a sphere from three circles. How would you make a sphere from three circles?

I wrote a puzzle in New Scientist!

@peterrowlett DALL•E Mini also thinks "functor and monoids" are cartoon characters.

I played around with DALL•E Mini (now craiyon) - an AI image generator. I asked it to generate images of mathematics and mathematicians and some related topics and variants. Some results, some thoughts: aperiodical.com/2022/06/what-d

I suddenly realised earlier that I can fill a Hex board with a random assortment of counters using the LaTeX package hexboard. I'm not sure this is useful, mind you! In fact, less sure the more I think about it...

I was invited onto BBC Radio Kent today (I seem to have been added to some sort of list!) to talk about Imperial units. Listen at bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0c6bvxk from 1:42:10.

I was invited onto BBC Radio Bristol today for a little chat about the origins of mathematics. Starts at 3:27:30 straight after ABBA and runs for about 6 mins. bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0c3zz97

What we call mathematics aperiodical.com/2022/05/what-w

Some thoughts about the subject we call mathematics and how that does - and doesn't - change.

New episode of the Mathematical Objects podcast: PageRank.

Katie and I have a chat about a weird voting system that's secretly hugely important.

aperiodical.com/2022/05/mathem

I wrote a paper about partially-automated assessment, essentially asking can we get the advantages of automated question-setting without the limitations of automated marking? It's just been published in an issue of International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology.

doi.org/10.1080/0020739X.2020.

Unsure how many HE teaching people are on here, but just to say we've published the new issue of MSOR Connections, the second of two special issues containing papers from the CETL-MSOR Conference 2021. Innovative practice in teaching, learning, assessment and support in maths, stats and OR. Read for free here: journals.gre.ac.uk/index.php/m

Three journal special issues I'm aware of on university mathematics, statistics and OR teaching, learning, assessment, support, etc. during COVID:
- Restarting the new normal academic.oup.com/teamat/issue/
- Takeaways from teaching through a global pandemic tandfonline.com/toc/tmes20/53/
- Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic journals.gre.ac.uk/index.php/m

I'm an editor for one, editorial board for another and ex-editorial board for the third. Are there any others?

Katie Steckles and I have a podcast called Mathematical Objects, which releases a short chat on a mathematical topic fortnightly in seasons of 8 episodes.

Today's episode is "A joke" with special guest Bec Hill. We talk about similarities and differences between maths and jokes.

Hopefully you can find it where you normally find podcasts (let me know if not!) or listen/subscribe/etc. via aperiodical.com/2022/05/mathem

I'm used to right-clicking on a MathJax-rendered equation and getting a menu like this, but this doesn't work here. Is that deliberate? Is it something to worry about? @christianp?

Here's a cute idea combining modelling and combinatorics - what if, calculating lottery probabilities, you model the lottery leaving out some possible tickets? Does it change your conclusions? I run through the calculations for ignoring tickets that are all squares, tickets that are all odds, and tickets with a 7.

An incorrect model of the lottery, and when it doesn’t matter aperiodical.com/2022/04/an-inc

The idea is from Matt Parker on A Problem Squared 032.

I wrote a blog post giving some background why we made this and some detail about how to use it here: aperiodical.com/2022/02/introd

There are a bunch of bells and whistles like drawing lines, highlighting cells, writing labels, changing the colours, etc. etc. There's loads of detail in the documentation which can be found on the CTAN page: ctan.org/pkg/hexboard

Do you have hexboard installed? You might. To see, make a LaTeX file with \usepackage{hexboard} in the preamble and see if it runs. If you use MiKTeX, it should be that compiling a document that uses the hexboard package will install it for you. If you use TeXLive, you may need to update packages (e.g. tlmgr install hexboard).

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