How does this statement, from National Lottery CEO Andria Vidler, compute?

"Roman numerals have no zero" Well, yes, why would they?!

@wandsworthlabour.bsky.social In April 2023 I paid £175 for my annual parking permit. In April 2024, 2025 and 2026 the price increased by 6.8%, 9.6% and 22%. 1. What does the permit cost now? 2. Should I be glad that these sly increases ameliorate the effect of the council's council tax freeze?

Glass half full, or glass 7/8 empty?!

The effects of a one way stretch

Imagine replacing 90 in this item. For what other numbers would the item still work?

@sainsburys.bsky.social How on earth did they get 8.71?

#Sainsburys Gulp! What is going on here?

Spring has arrived in Sunny Wandsworth

Find a quick way to count the dots....

Two ways of adding 1/2 and 1/3 using Streefland's idea of 'seating arrangements' for, say, sharing pancakes: [the Dutch 'of' and 'dus' = the English 'or' and 'so']

In #MathsToday I sketched this str line through 12,0 and 0,12 and asked for the coords of other points on the line. The Y11 student tried x=6 and thought y might be 8, or 7, or, eventually, 6. After agreeing 12,0 0,12 6,6 3,9 7,5 and 1,11 it took a while to spot x+y=12. The student 'knows' y=mx+c.

@wandsworthlabour.bsky.social It's 0%, Jim, but not as we know it

3 pancakes shared equally between 8 people = 3/8 pancakes between 1 people

I've just had to send off my current passport in order to get it renewed. Until I get it back, I'm staying indoors to avoid Shabana putting me in an asylum hotel.

I'm beginning to think that our flawed first-past-the-post system might give us a good chance to defeat Reform at the General Election through a growing willingness of people to vote tactically (but requires good evidence about which party is the non-Reform front runner is each constituency)

#EE Maths, according to my EE broadband service:

When we introduce fractions as parts of a whole, are we conveying the idea of a number that expresses a ratio, or are we describing a quantity of, say, pizza?

I've recently come across this nice task - nice because I imagine many pupils' initial ideas won't work, but they might collectively get to a solution through (guided) discussion.

How are the total lengths of these yellow+black lines determined? Weird.

Two subtly different methods for solving an equation with the unknown on both sides

Lawrence Atkinson, a 'minor' British artist (!873 - 1931). Fab

In #MathsToday we worked on 16÷6. A good follow up might be to explore '4 chocolate bars shared by 6 people'.

In the January 2026 edition of Maths in School, the LUMENaries Shore, Foster and Francome present an intriguing method for solving simultaneous equations. Here it is applied to a simple linear equation in one unknown:

I was looking for an image of that doomed advertising campaign from long ago for Strand cigarettes. This is what Google's AI toddler gave me when I typed the advertising slogan, You're never alone with a Strand:

Stolen Moments. This is what they look like. [According Shazam/Apple]

SHAZAM is an amazing demonstration of the power of AI to search through masses of data in seconds. And then it gives minimal information beyond providing a link to buy the identified track from APPLE, the owners of the app.

Music in pictures ?!

#MathsToday A young student putting numbers on a number line segment (starting at the bottom of the page). His approach was to count in ones, starting from the left (0), with little or no attention paid to the number on the right end of the segment. Seems like an information-processing issue.

This seems kinda strange. The graph is a powerful model for showing that with simultaneous equations we are looking to see where values coincide. But while we can immediately see from these equations that they coincide when x=4, this would be far less obvious from just trying to visualise the graph.

#MathsToday Counting matchsticks by matching in pairs

London today. If you think the sun rises in the East and sinks in the West, think again!

Man City owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family, Exeter City owned by its supporters. Sad.

This was taken on Wednesday, 15 minutes before sunrise. How is it that the moon is already 'pointing upwards'?

In #MathsToday we tried to solve this pair of mis-transcribed 'simultaneous equations': 4x + 4 = 14 3x – 4 = 14. So 7x = 28, so x = 4. [It seems to me we need to radically rethink the content of GCSE maths and how we teach it!]

#MathsUntangle Week 14 Estimate.... Analyse.... mathsuntangle.blogspot.com

That took me a while to understand...

This came to me in a dream. Oh well!

How come it costs €1.20 to send a card from Germany, but £3.20 to send one back?!

Clusters of mistletoe have suddenly appeared on our apple tree...

#MathsToday Used this task with a group of Y10 students. They struggled to view the task structurally, even when their arithmetic produced the result 241. But they gained some insight with 7x12 – 6x12.

Just received my copy of MT 298, with my article on mathematical thinking

Para tree

#MathsToday Memories of Pythagoras A Y11 pupil tells me he saw a video about Pythagoras' Theorem with diagrams like these:

interesting thought? - as it rotates, what happens to the length of the segment through the centre of the pentagon that cuts the pentagon in two?

Does this make sense? If only 2% give , what use is a donation of £2.75?

I don't think the fault lies with Bill Posters. All the rest seems to line up.

Amazon-speak for Package was left on doorstep

Think of ways to solve this