Tagged: math

Penrose Paving 0

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...

Apocalypse Clock 0

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...

3

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...

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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...

1

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...

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Exa

During the 80’s and 90’s I was involved with quite a string of startups. Each one was an interesting story. Some folded, some split into pieces, some sold to bigger companies, and some changed...

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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...

Videos 0

Videos

Here are some videos we’ve enjoyed recently. We really enjoyed this one by J. Nathan Matias about what the weekend is like at the Media Lab. “Friday” at the MIT Media Lab from J....

Parity of d(n) 0

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...

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6.849

MIT’s Open Courseware is a wonderful thing. Recently I’ve been watching Erik Demaine’s lectures on the math behind origami. They’re really fun lectures, and it’s a very interesting subject. I love the sense of...