The Big Internet Math Off 2018

The Aperiodical first Big Internet Math Off competition: sixteen mathematicians compete in a bracket tournament, each presenting a short pitch on a piece of mathematics they love. Readers voted for whichever pitch produces the loudest “Aha!” The competition ran for the first time in 2018, aiming to find the “World’s Most Interesting Mathematician”.

I was invited to take part and made it all the way to the semi-finals.

The Pitches

Round 1 vs Colin Wright: Penrose tiles Two shapes that tile the plane but only non-periodically — the pattern never repeats. I showed how they also predicted quasicrystals, a discovery so unexpected that the scientist who found them was initially asked to leave his research institute. The Nobel Prize followed. More on:Lasercut Penrose Tiles

Round 2 vs Paul Taylor: The Collatz sequence Take any number: if it’s even, halve it; if it’s odd, apply $(3x+1)/2$. Repeat. Every number ever tested eventually collapses to the loop $1 \to 2 \to 1$, yet no one has proved this always happens. I showed visualisations of the paths from all numbers up to 60,000 converging — seaweed or a Lovecraftian horror, depending on your taste. More on: Collatz Seaweed

Semi-final vs Matt Parker: Curvahedra and the geometry of curvature What does it mean for a surface to curve? I used Curvahedra — triangles joined at their corners — to show how the angle deficiency at each corner controls the curvature of the resulting surface, connecting Gauss’s Theorema Egregium and the Gauss–Bonnet theorem to something you can build with paper and tape. Lost 49% to 51%, a margin of 26 votes out of 2,482 cast. More on: Curvahedra

The winner was Nira Chamberlain, who presented on applied mathematics in the final.