Maths on Eclectic Stacks

Slide Rules and Nut-Crackers

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 14:00:00 +0100

The discussion “Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?” on Hacker News reminded me of the children’s maths/puzzle book Nut-Crackers (1971) I once had, with cut-out paper slide rule at the back - and set me re-visiting what other mathematical games it had contained.

Quizzes in the Goldilocks Zone

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0000

At the pub quiz - “What is a hyperbola?”

Among those of us around the table were three mathematicians, wondering what definition they were looking for…

The Filing Cabinet and the Imp (March 2004)

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 22:00:00 +0000

[This post - on archives (and their ultimately inconsequential gaps), the mathematical quirks of unexpected hangings and “The Bottle Imp” by Robert Louis Stevenson - was adapted from a post originally published on LiveJournal on 23 March 2004 and is re-posted here as part of a migration from Livejournal. It has some minor editing, interjections from 2022, and fixing/replacement of broken links - not everywhere has been able to follow Tim Berners-Lee’s 1998-and-still-there advice that Cool URIs don’t change.]

Maths jokes from Alexa, Google, and Princeton

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 12:00:00 +0100

When deciding which home assistant is best, a key test might be “OK Google/Alexa, tell me a maths joke”. (OK, your priorities may vary.) Alexa has a variety. Google has only one, and that is “How do you keep warm in a cold room? You go to the corner, because it’s always 90 degrees.”