Penrose Paving
I love this time lapse video of installing the pavement at the new Andrew Wiles building at Oxford. I bet the construction crew thought it was an interesting project. If you’re not familiar with...
Tagged: math
Apocalypse Clock
They say that according to the Mayan calendar the world is going to end this Friday. I don’t think that’s true, but the Mayan calendar is pretty interesting. In fact most of the details...
Base i-1: There Be Dragons
John Baez recently posted this picture (by Anton Sherwood) on his G+ stream: The story behind it is pretty cool, and it involves two of my favorite things: TAOCP and unusual number systems. Let’s...
Three Polyhedra
Peter’s Geometry homework this week was to build a polyhedron. He got a little carried away and created this family of three. Aren’t they pretty? The one in the front is the cuboctahedron. The...
The Mathematics of Tomato Cages
Chris recently bought some new cages for supporting the tomatoes. They’re a bit fancier than our old ones. They look like this: There are three poles which you stick into the dirt. Then you...
Irregular Path Tiles
In my posts a couple of months ago about the number of permutations in various path tile games (link1, link2, link3), I only talked about regular polygons. There are other shapes which tile the...
Parity of d(n)
The other day Tom was talking about a problem they did in his math class. Here’s a slightly modified version. Consider an infinite list of bits. The first bit represents the number 1; The...
