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Not one for the faint hearted. I've got a degree in maths and I'm going to have to sit down in a darkened room with a wet towel to make any sense of the preamble.....

I've got a PhD in maths, but I echo Smellyharry's thoughts. The rubric is a very complicated piece of prose, which I haven't yet comprehended. Good luck to all

I recommend the Harpers puzzle posted below if anyone doesn't fancy numbers!
It's not the best quality print out...made me feel a bit sick trying to read it, but got there in the end!

To be honest, I had expected the numerical last week. I'm sure the timings of the numericals were adjusted some years ago to prevent them occurring on a holiday weekend?
I will look forward (?!) to tackling it tomorrow...

Maybe this is not the place, but I too have a degree in Maths (albeit over 60 years ago). 4827 required us to interpret the word "homotopic". The BRB doesn't list it, nor do Collins or OED. The SOED has it, but in terms so technical that I can't relate them to the instructions about the shapes of letters to be highlighted in the river. I highlighted the river as it appears in the wikipedia map of Konigsburg at the appropriate time. I shall be very vexed if I am marked wrong as I can't for the life of me see how a non-mathematician (or a very old one) caninterpret homotopic. Do others agree?

I sympathise Cockie, but I fear you will be disappointed. I had to Google it, but didn't take very long to get a fairly clear idea as to what letters were homotopic to each other.

On the numerical, can confirm once you finally get your head round what's going on, it is quite approachable. I have 60% of the grid filled (hopefully correctly) after an hour.

According to the Listener Crossword website, on the subject of mathematical puzzles: "It is now normal practice to schedule these as the penultimate puzzles in February, May, August and November, although this may be perturbed by the need to publish a letter-based puzzle on one of those dates, for thematic reasons."

Thanks for the clarification Will.

I believe I understand the preamble but have no clue where to start to generate a list of triples that create all the triangular sums.
I only have A Level Maths...
I assume Cross Numbers Quarterly don't include this list in their useful lists...

I don't think it violates our rules for me to post this:

A 'thematic triple' is a triple (a,b,c) where a