Domino Computer

In 2012, I helped Matt Parker design and build a computer entirely out of dominoes.

Mercator Rotator

The Mercator projection is very handy for online maps and sailing, but creates some pretty distorted images. This lets you explore that distortion by changing where it’s centred away from the familiar north/south pole arrangement.

MegaMenger

In 2014, Matt Parker and Laura Taalman ran the the MegaMenger project, with the aim of building a giant Menger sponge from card.

I built some of the Manchester build, as well as the image gallery for the project, which may be the world’s first 2.7D website.

Megapixel

In 2016, I helped Katie Steckles and Matt Parker build the Megapixel, a digital display made out of transparent plastic and red, green and blue OHP markers. This is my writeup and dive into the calibration maths.

Menace

In another of Matt's silly projects for Manchester Science Festival, we taught 300 matchboxes to play noughts and crosses.

Snowflakes

This is a blogpost exploring just how one arm of a snowflake knows what the others are doing, using cellular automata.

The Mandelbrot Set

I am a big fan of the Mandelbrot Set, and have built this tool so that you can explore it, and written this article about how to find π in there (which uses my exploring gadget).

I have also built a gadget for playing with Koch snowflake curves

and one which generates Sierpinski gaskets from random patterns of dots.

Stupid Formulæ

I get frustrated by the stupid formulæ used by marketing companies to generate nonsense ‘news’ reports about their clients’ products. So I did some research.

Electoral Maths

During the 2011 referendum on the Alternative Vote, I got quite interested in the maths of voting systems. I wrote this blog post about the rather silly idea that “AV can elect the loser”, and this for the Aperiodical relating the nonsense of voting systems to the nonsense of ThinkMaths’ Grime Dice, which eventually became an item on BBC Radio 4’s Material World.

Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension

I produced some of the ‘DVD extras’ for Matt Parker’s book Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, and wrote this article explaining more about them.

The Polygonal Number Checker is the best part.

I also helped create the rather silly index for the paperback re-issue.

Festival of the Spoken Nerd

I do seem to have become Festival of the Spoken Nerd’s tamed programmer. For example, I made these alternative subtitles for their DVD.

Matt Parker Speaks Binary

A conversation at Manchester MathsJam got badly out of hand, and so me, Luna and Katie accidentally built this.