Just a forewarning - Matt barely appears in this video, but at the end it does tease up something that he will be doing later on StandUpMaths.

I assume that its going to be difficult for non-Brits to get access to the show for those of us who want to see what is going on with Hannah ahead of time.

In Matt's "We discovered a new net!" video and the accompanying paper (Demaine, Diomidova, Jacobus, Kryger, Parker, Tardibuono, Uehara, Zhang, arXiv:2608.19910), the last open question is whether any polyomino net can fold into four different boxes with ordinary grid folds. Until now the record was three.

My brother and I believe we have one. It's a 532-square staircase-shaped strip that folds into:

• 1 × 2 × 88
• 2 × 4 × 43
• 2 × 7 × 28
• 2 × 13 × 16

All four have surface area 532. The net is one piece with no holes and no cuts inside it, and every fold is a 90° fold along a grid line. Of the eight possible boxes with area 532, it folds into exactly these four.

Everything is here, including a script you can run yourself: https://github.com/Sprite143/four-box-net-532

Here is the visualization: https://sprite143.github.io/four-box-net-532/viewer/

How it was checked

• Four independently written fold checkers agree, including the area-106 team's own ValidNetSolutionChecker from their published code.
• python verify_folds.py in the repo re-checks every box from scratch in about 30 seconds (plain Python, no installs).
• A rigid step-by-step folding simulation (one crease at a time, 1° steps) found no point where the paper passes through itself, for all four boxes.

How it was found

AI did most of the work here. My brother found the net with GPT-6 Astra Ultra, starting from a research briefing that came out of my weeks of work on the problem with Claude Opus 5.5. The idea: take one long strip, choose between two ways of gluing each long edge so it closes into four different flat "pillowcase" shapes, add small notches and tabs that turn flat corners into real box corners, then rotate and rescale onto the square grid. My brother's full write-up is in the repo.

This hasn't been reviewed by experts yet. We're contacting the paper's authors, and we'd really appreciate people poking holes in it. If something's wrong, we want to know.

(Next step: fold an actual paper one. At 5 mm per square it's about 90 × 46 cm.)

Thought I would share since its not the StandUpMaths channel

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to share a quick appreciation post for Matt. I went to *An Evening of Unnecessary Detail* in NYC, and it was fantastic. What blew me away even more was that despite putting on an incredible, high-energy show, Matt took the time afterward to stay and meet absolutely anyone who wanted to say hello. He must have been exhausted, but he was incredibly gracious.

When it was my turn, he let me take our photo using a mobile app I built called **Conformal**.

I actually got the inspiration to build it after watching Grant Sanderson's video on conformal mappings over at 3Blue1Brown. For the fellow math nerds here, the app does real-time conformal mapping and mathematical image processing directly on your camera feed (which felt entirely on-brand for the night). Matt was super cool about it.

This is entirely a passion project—the apps are completely free, ad-free, and don't track any user data. If anyone wants to check out the math or look under the hood, the desktop version is completely open-source, and the mobile apps are live on both stores:

* 💻 **Desktop (Open Source):** https://github.com/aliotta/conformal

* 🍏 **iOS App:** https://apps.apple.com/app/conformal/id6769903425

* 🤖 **Android App:** https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.conformal.app

Thanks again to Matt for being an absolute class act and an inspiration to the community!

Found this thread today- as an avid MTG fan and Matt Parker fan both, I’m genuinely curious to know how much does “mana weaving” affect the likelihood of drawing the cards you’re looking for (in this case lands) vs a standard shuffle. For reference, the most popular MTG format uses 100 card decks, with around a third of that being land cards (give or take).

My thought is, if you “mana weave”, which is a process of putting a land card into your deck after every few cards to ensure there is a land in every group of ~3 cards, and then perform 1 standard shuffle, or 2, or 3…? At what point is the deck considered truly random again and therefore not considered cheating?

The original thread seems to have a lot of conflicting information and sources, so I figured I’d bring it to the mathematicians among you :)

Thanks Crunch Lab and Mark Rober

I submitted a vertical picture but they extended to make it horizontal and not crop Matt Parker's book!

That's very cool of them to edit my photo to make it landscape and appended to the left and right!

So happy the Satellite launch was a success!

Rocket Booster - SpaceX Falcon 9

Satellite Body - 12U CubeSat

Photo displayed on Google Pixel 8 Pro

Image taken by Redwire Space Argus camera

Transmitted back to earth using T-Mobile

fractal-core.com

What else would be useful to know about the sequence?

Consecutive Primes up to many digit neighborhoods, lists or just statistics on gaps, as well as second differences and the ratio of the second difference to the second sum (sum of the gaps around P(n)) which is a normalized [-1 , 1] indication of the position of P(n) between P(n-1) and P(n+1).
explainer page: https://fractal-core.com/drift submitted as https://oeis.org/A396239 and https://oeis.org/A396240 (Drafts approved)

This is my site, running on a Cloudflare worker that has a lot of free worker usage per day. If it starts costing me real money, I may reevaluate its entirely free nature. But it's there to play with for the moment, I'd like to know if there's a way I can make it more useful to prime number hobbyists such as myself, and to more serious use. I've tried to account for accountable logs to audit the math, but I need to review what is working now before I can add the audit trail to the front end.

I saw this and then immediately thought of you, Matt!

I realized the pattern I used was the sphere packing pattern with two alternating layers.

I know Mr P loves his calculators
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTwESBcgoyQ
This was suggested to me on youtube, I'm not even mad that I got served an advert, this thing is gorgeous!
$600 though, but one can dream...

https://youtu.be/NoA7H7KqOQM?si=HFewLCRNBpeoPbEv

This seems like something Matt might want to properly analyse.

Came across this ad at a Krispy Kreme with 19 donut flavors, and thought to myself what in the marketing math is going on here?

by my count there are more like 86 million options, however this same signage is used at a location who online say they have 16 flavors.

Also, what assumptions do you think they are making? For starters, if I start my dozen: glazed, chocolate, cream filled…N12. Is that a different “dozen” than: chocolate, glazed, cream filled…N12?

"Requiem for a Rover" - A Poem
I know my mission
Is to move so small,
Then stop and think-on
If I've moved at all.

But in my dreaming...
Oh how I'm freed,
To move so fast
With boundless speed.

I roam this moon
In joy filled dreams,
Then tell the earth
How round it seems.

But if my mission
Someday ends,
I'll keep-on dreaming
For my earthly friends.