Practical gifts for mathematicians

[AnotheChinHair]

Nephew, doing maths and further maths a level, about to turn 17. Really loves maths. Any ideas?

www.presentindicative.com/collections/mathematics

GCHQ puzzle book?

I will follow this with interest. By practical, what do you mean? There are a tonne of maths-y gifts here, but I've never thought they were that practical: <a class="break-all" href="//www.www.presentindicative.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">www.www.presentindicative.com/. Or some more practical ideas here: mathsgear.co.uk/collections/kitchen.

Membership of the Royal Institution? Once he's at university, you'd be able to give him membership of the London Mathematics Society as an undergraduate, and I think you can join at the higher fee as an interested member of the public. They have good talks, and a journal.

Or there are some great books out there - Birth of a Theorem by Cedric Villani is fascinating on the topic of what maths at the very highest level looks like (the maths, I am told, is nearly impenetrable but that's not the point - it's more like a pretty decoration). Or some kind of "popular maths" book that would stand him in good stead at a university interview - "A Mathematician's Apology" by GH Hardy is old but still a classic on what it means to do maths. Or "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter is a cult classic and was very popular with the people studying maths when I was at university.

By practical I mean that I don't want novely humourous gifts.
I'd like to have recommendations for proper rulers, calculators... that kind of thing.

I like the idea of those books, thank you WhyIsMyKitchenSoCold

Give him a pencil and a piece of paper and see if he can come up with a solution.

A subscription to Mathematical pie?

www.m-a.org.uk/mathematical-pie

Dunoon make a lovely bone China mug with maths stuff on it.

I suspect he will have a good calculator already. If you want something somewhat practical and also fun, an old fashioned slide rule and some log tables? Won't be anything his calculator can't do but could be interesting for him to play around with.

How about a really nice pen? One of the joys of maths is that you can really do it anywhere if you have a pen and some paper...[looks hard at DH who is currently staring out the window sucking his pen instead of doing the maths he said he needed to do rather than cut the grass]

I'd like to have recommendations for proper rulers, calculators
I suspect he has to have a certain model for exams/uni. We had a choice of 2 models we were allowed to use in exams and they were very strict.

BrownOwlknowsbest he's going to turn 17

An old-fashioned slide rule?

He'll probably have good calculators and rulers but I would ask if he has a flexible ruler for plotting curves and if people still use them. I still have mine somewhere, but it's 30 years since I did A level maths and people probably use computers these days.

I and a colleague who's a real maths nerd like the game in the Times that begins with T and is a number puzzle, so a puzzle book of one of those. Tectoni or something.

He will already have a decent enough calculator - you can get programmable ones but they tend not to be permitted in exams so it’s a bit pointless. Calculators / rulers don’t make much of an appearance in university maths anyway - it really is all about a pen, paper and your brain. How about nice notepads / pens as suggested above?

On a slight tangent though related would be coding type gifts (eg a Raspberry Pi) - is he interested in that kind of thing?

My DD is in her first year maths degree.
We asked her if she wanted a new calculator for her birthday. She laughed and told me that she already has the one that is necessary.

Tetonor, that's it.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/threads-im-on

I still have my school calculator, it still works and I still use it for proper maths. I'm 47.

Sorry fucked up the link.

www.amazon.co.uk/Sunday-Times-Tetonor-Puzzle-Books/dp/0008290385?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

Get him a white board and some pens. Best Christmas present ever according to DS who is a first year Maths undergrad.

Perhaps a nice pencil/pen (though a good machinal pencil were favoured by pretty much everyone I went to uni with for my undergrad). Or maybe a high quality dotted or squared paper note book? As a maths grad that would have been my preference. Tbh looking at my desk now those are the only two things that were bought for me that I use day today. There's not a lot stuff needed really.

I tend not to like puzzles, rubix cubes etc. I do that kind of thinking all day and I don't want to fill my spare time with the same stuff. But he could be the complete opposite.

So perhaps something like the raspberry pie suggested above is a good idea. It could be different enough that it's interesting but still in theme.

Not particularly practical but I gave my math nerd a subscription to the NYTimes Games app. She uses it all the time.

Also MIT in Boston does an event called MIT Splash each year, where high schoolers get to do classes run by MIT students. I don't know if it's open to UK high schoolers but my maths nerd attended some maths classes there on stuff I can't even pronounce let alone understand.

It was run as a virtual event last year - not sure whether it'll be running this year, but I bet he'd enjoy it if it is.