Sarah Hart

Babylonian tablet preserves student's 4,000-year-old geometry mistake A small clay tablet from the site of Kish in Iraq reveals a student calculated the area of a triangle incorrectly 4,000 years ago.

A bit of #maths #history at the @ashmoleanmuseum.bsky.social makes the news!

Making mistakes in maths is not a new thing, by a long, long way, and is an essential part of learning.

🏛️🎓 #MathsInMuseums #MathsToday

Christmas card 2024 As usual, I spent some time this November, designing this year's Chalkdust puzzle Christmas card (with some help from TD).

The online version of the @chalkdustmag.bsky.social 2024 Christmas card is now available at mscroggs.co.uk/blog/112.

It includes a link to a printable A4 version (@teachers: this can fill an end of term maths lesson!)

You can also still buy physical cards at mscroggs.co.uk/cards.

Image description: This poem is presented in the form an excel spreadsheet, with words in each cell. The line ‘Our cells shall merge themselves together’ is in a longer merged cell, and there are filter arrows on the line ‘Remove this filter from my heart’. Love Excels Let's spread ourselves on sheets of love, and turn our data into poetry. Our cells shall merge themselves together as you wrap your text around me. Our sum is greater than our parts, let's crunch our figures without compunction. Remove this filter from my heart, you give me form and function. We shall frolic among the formulae, pivot our tables now and often. I will total all your rows and you can add my column. Brian Bilston

Today’s poem is called ‘Love Excels’.

I'm here! I've moved over from X/Twitter. Some others Bridges/math-art people (I'm sure I'm missing some/many): @sarah-hart.bsky.social, @mathgrrl.bsky.social, @ayliean.bsky.social, @drmathart.bsky.social, @gelada.bsky.social.

Word Crunching I  wrote  a poem  on a page  but then each line grew  to the word sum of the previous two  until I began to worry about all these words coming with such frequency  because as you can see, it can be easy to run out of space when a poem gets all Fibonacci sequency  Brian Bilston

Today’s poem celebrates Fibonacci Day. It’s called ‘Word Crunching’.

The Royal Society is on Bluesky! We are the independent scientific academy of the UK, founded in 1660 and dedicated to promoting excellence in science for the benefit of humanity. Follow us for the latest research, fascinating looks at science history, events and more: royalsociety.org

To be fair, he’d be out of his depth on a sheet of graphene.

Good luck with that!

Clearly the next question is: how many Bluesky users will there have to be before if we all buy a random lottery ticket, there’s a better than 50% chance that at least one of us wins the jackpot?

Wonderful! 🌍

Is that..”talking maths with your kids”?

We do various ciphers/encryption as well as steganography, it’s a lovely jumble of wordplay, number play, reasoning and riddles.

In short, yes!

My daughter and I like to make each other treasure hunts where the clues are a mix of puzzles, riddles, and cryptography.

The little snack I made last time is more than meets the eye…

Having trouble remembering which Naomi is sane and which one thinks vaccines cause time travel and squirrels are a government plot (probably)?

This simple rhyme should help:

If it’s Klein, you’ll be fine.
If it’s Wolf, watch yoursolf.

YouTube video by Clay Mathematics Institute Timothy Gowers, Some recent developments in combinatorics

There have been several remarkable developments in combinatorics, my field of mathematics. A few weeks ago I gave a talk to a general mathematical audience in which I described six breakthroughs from the last five years.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=726O...

Twitter message “Your account is deactivated. Sorry to see you go. #GoodBye”

Before deactivating, I posted on Twitter that I’m leaving for Bluesky.

I’m crushed to have to report that this has irked a person describing themselves in their bio as a “bronze-age AI gigachad”.

I get the feeling I’m not going to miss Twitter much.

Logicians: P is fine, it’s NP I’m worried about.

Argh!

Why thank you! 😊

This is going to be amazing. Walthamstow Rock’n’Roll book club is the best thing about Walthamstow, and about Rock’n’roll, and about books and about life in general. And Mark Hart who runs it is the World’s Greatest Human. (Which of course is why I married him.) @rnrbook-club.bsky.social

A poem about the experience of learning.

#MathsEdPoetry day 2.
Both the @atmmathematics.bsky.social principle "the power to learn rests with the learner" and Daniel Willingham's phrase "learning is the residue of thought" point to the idea that learning is done by the learner. It is not something that can be done to them. From MT287.

New York Times games app Sudoku descriptor “try this numbers game, minus the math”

This is how the NYT describes Sudoku. Why disavow the lovely maths involved: logic patterns, etc - loads of good stuff? Really they mean “try this math game, minus the arithmetic”.

In fact there’s so much fun related maths I gave a Gresham lecture all about it

www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/ma...

You will know, despite it not being in my handle any more, that Math(s) is my homeland.
So I've made this starter pack of excellent math(s) communicators in case you'd like to follow them too.

go.bsky.app/8JvssAA

Thanks @kityates.bsky.social for taking the time to do this! V liking bluesky!

We're pleased to be included on this starter pack of math(s) communicators by the brill @kityates.bsky.social! Check it out for a who's who of talking math(s) in public: bsky.app/starter-pack...

Thanks @teakayb.bsky.social - I loved @robeastaway.bsky.social’s recent book Much Ado About Numbers, about Shakespeare + maths.
The British Society for the History of Maths awards a biennial prize for the best pop maths/history book, loads of good ones among past winners www.bshm.ac.uk/neumann-prize

Monetisation The advert said MONETISE YOUR FOLLOWERS so he thought he would respond; by painting them in the changing light, like waterlilies in a pond. Brian Bilston

Today’s poem is called ‘Monetisation’.

Good morning.

Word of the Day is as beautiful as it is underused. ‘Confelicity’ is finding joy in the happiness and success of others.

Morning!

Fascinating - thanks for sharing!