Author Archives: zoelgriffiths

Maths and Geography are different disciplines that meet in multiple places, like different countries that share a border. I’ve always been fascinated by Geography (in particular, maps) and maths, and so the release of a new book about both excited me. Paulina Rowińska’s Mapmatics is an intriguing and entertaining read. This fascinating book leads us […]

I’ve used much of lockdown as an opportunity to teach myself Python, the computer coding language. I started lockdown as an absolute beginner and am now a fan. I’ve found that giving myself projects and problems to solve has been the most effective way of learning, so I was pleased to be challenged with a […]

This is the 182nd edition of the The Carnival of Mathematics, a blog with a rotating cast of authors that summarises all the fun and intriguing bits of maths that the internet has served up in the previous month. This edition will begin — as has become traditional — with facts about the number of […]

Here is a video I made about the maths of one of my favourite games ‘Geistes Blitz’ (Ghost Bliz).  In investigating Geistes Blitz, I made a new game ‘Shape Match’ which I call the ‘mathematically sensible’ version of Geistes Blitz. It has a nice mathematical property that Geistes Blitz doesn’t have.  You can download and […]

This is a video about some tricks that use binary to make them work. For anyone at the UK Annual Maths Jam Gathering 2019 – this is an explanation of how I did the coin flip trick in my talk. https://youtu.be/QtFtfD6cG1U Here is a website I used to help me practise: http://www.shodor.org/interactivateJS/Coin/Coin.html Annual Maths Jam […]

This post is about Pascal’s Triangle related puzzles and the value of re-framing problems in multiple different ways in order to draw our attention to alternative solutions. I’ve seen multiple Pascal’s Triangle related puzzles that look something like this. You have a 6 by 6 square grid and a counter. The counter can start in […]

What do 13, 37, 41 and 91 have in common? They are all cycling numbers*! What are cycling numbers? Try this trick about the number 37: • Take a three-digit multiple of 37 (for example 481). It will be more interesting if all the digits of your multiple are different. • ‘Cycle’ it (re-write it […]