Ten things you didn’t notice in Issue 06

You won’t believe number 5!

Next Tuesday, Chalkdust issue 07 will be released (don’t forget to book your free ticket to our launch event). To help you to get as excited about the launch as we are, here are some of the things we hid in issue 06.

1. A Mary Poppins reference

Hopefully this one got you singing.

2. Sophie Willock

Sophie Willock wrote a letter to Dirichlet. Who is Sophie Willock, you may be asking? Turns out it’s Sophie Bryant before she married.

3. Scorpions

It just wouldn’t be an issue of Chalkdust without scorpions everywhere.

4. Balanced ternary

Rob Low’s article on balanced ternary showed you how to write numbers in base 3, using 0, 1 and -1. During this article, the page numbers were written in balanced ternary

5. Grumpy Gauss

In our interview, Cédric Villani told us how he’d love to travel back in time to meet Gauss, although maybe Gauss would be too grumpy to talk to him. It was accompanied by this picture of him looking grumpy.

In the original portrait, Gauss is a lot less grumpy. Adam had a lot of fun playing with this portrait in Photoshop.

Once again, the crossnumber header was made with part of the previous crossnumber.

7. Crossnumber grid

At first glance, issue 06’s crossnumber grid looked like it had no symmetry. But after a longer look, you may notice that turning it upside down inverts the colours. Humbug had a lot of fun designing this grid.

8. A typo

A strong contender for the stupidest joke in issue 06 award.

9. LaTeX

Just to prove that we made the whole thing in LaTeX, we snuck a couple of \LaTeX{}s in.

Edit: It’s just been pointed out to me that I missed a thing. Here it is:

10. The number on the cover

This number in balanced ternary appeared on the cover. If you translate it into decimal, you get 5318008.

Hopefully these have got you excited about issue 07, where we have hidden even more things! Make sure you come along to our launch quiz to pick up your copy and start looking…

• Solutions to recent puzzles

Looking back at puzzles about complex numbers, tic-tac-toe, and the Eggnog Mystery
• Christmas competition #2: ‘More geometry snacks’

Win this year's best book of geometry puzzles
• Christmas competition #1: ‘You can’t polish a nerd’

Win a DVD boxset from Festival of the spoken nerd in our first Christmas competition!
• Talkdust, episode 1

A podcast for the mathematically curious
• How to make: a Möbius Surprise

Surprise yourself by making this thing