For my son's 14th birthday he requested a chocolate cake, and as he loves guitar my daughter and I made a chocolate guitar cake. It got exactly the response I hoped for - 'I'm impressed by how accurate it is'.

I spent my Sunday at a top-secret location rehearsing for an exciting maths music thing. Can't say anything more yet but watch this space...

#maths #music #MathsMusic #PseudoRandomEnsemble

#MathsArtMarch day 5: Discovery

Two middle-of-the-night discoveries I made while waiting for my elderly dog to do his thing in the garden.

1: When only the over-bench lights are on there's a square shadow in the middle of the kitchen.

2: Cool cheese grater shadow!

#MathArtMarch Days 3 and 4: Nature and Swirly

Nature: a Pythagorean tree superimposed on a photo of me and my kids at the beautiful tree that used to be at Sycamore Gap, on Hadrian's Wall.

Swirly: another picture made by drawing circles through points on a parametric curve, this time a spiral.

#MathArtMarch Day 2: On a Square Grid

I made this for Craig Kaplan's Swirled Series, which is a fantastic collection of animations starting and ending with a square grid. isohedral.ca/swirled-seri...

Looks so professional, doesn't it? Not shown: the awful performance that resulted from playing an unfamiliar keyboard with no time for rehearsal and being barely able to hear the keyboard on stage. There are many joys in picking up a new skill as an adult, but this was a low point!

It was such a joy to sing to a warm and welcoming audience at the open mic session at Harry Baker's 'Something Borrowed' last night. The ARK Cliftonville Cultural Space is a gorgeous venue.

I haven't done #NerdyLooks before, but it occurred to me that this is something of a look and it's quite nerdy. The scarf is a representation of a Klein surface - it's a Mobius loop but also has a self-intersection (the fabric goes through itself) along its entire length.

Playing around with tangents of sin(x) in GeoGebra. The diamond grid was a surprise!

Possibly the best Chrismas present ever! Handmade coasters showing the most efficient ways to arrange a given number of squares inside a bigger square. Or, as I call them, tumbledown squares.

In 2019 I made a many-to-many shape sorter toy. The shapes were constructed so that each one fits through at least two of the holes, depending on which way round they are.

I wrote about it for The Aperiodical:
aperiodical.com/2019/03/many...

I had a fantastic time talking about square packing for An Evening of Unnecessary Detail with @fotsn.bsky.social last night! Such an enthusiastic audience, and I think I talked them into loving these slightly erratic square arrangements as much as I do.

Approximately 4.3% of the people at this year's #BigMathsJam were called Sam - and here we all are!