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Colin Beveridge

Maths, clearly

When I worked at a printing press one summer as a student, the staff spent several worker-hours every week following a complicated protocol to work out ink prices on a calculator. It was slow, tedious and error-prone, and I hated it, until the lunchtime I snuck on to the boss’s computer and put an Excel spreadsheet together to do the heavy lifting. After I was acquitted of witchcraft, the whole office adopted the solution; in retrospect, that spreadsheet probably saved the firm an order of magnitude more than what they paid me all summer.

I’m a freelance mathematician, which means I solve the kind of annoying problem you’ve probably been putting off.

For example, I’ve done work on:

  • Developing Python code to guide an autonomous underwater vehicle navigate into a dock
  • Calculating the volume of building materials in a development
  • Finding an Excel formula for the ideal sales price of goods to produce a given profit
  • Finding angles to help in plotting ellipses
  • Designing a Geogebra demonstration of a cool folding door
  • Persuading Excel to match postcodes with addresses
  • Developing a function to summarise “traffic light” ratings fairly in Excel

If it involves geometry, logic or graphs, I’m especially likely to be interested! Got a problem you think I can help with? Drop me an email: colin@colinbeveridge.co.uk.

Please note that there are some things I don’t do:

  • Work on Big Unsolved Problems. This is an ethical position: it is extremely unlikely that I’ll be able to do anything to help progress your thoughts on the Riemann Hypothesis or the Collatz Conjecture, and it would be wrong of me to take your money for it.
  • Homework
  • Production-grade code

Any questions? Email me: colin@colinbeveridge.co.uk.