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.

@aggsol nice to hear it! 😀

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.

@jhertzli that’s amazing!

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.

@RyunoKi agreed, I listen to longer podcasts sometimes but always broken over a couple of days. I just meant we tell ourselves it's 15 mins but frequently creep longer!

@RyunoKi delighted to hear it! Also pleased to hear you're buying into the '15 minutes per episode' lie we tell ourselves!

mathjax, github markdown

@pkra agree it's a good thing, but @christianp has trained me out of using $and$\$ for math mode!

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

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