Researchers find history in the diagrams of Euclid’s Elements
The fourth book of Euclid’s Elements, a 2,300-year-old geometry text, includes directions for constructing a 15-sided polygon inside a circle. The first…
Category: Math stories
Stories about math and mathematicians.
Creating sculpture with math
When he was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, teachers and parents told Helaman Ferguson he would have to…
Solving a math problem to create art
Optimization is the mathematical quest for the best way to do something, from finding the shortest distance between two places…
Zombie physics
For Alex Alemi and Matt Bierbaum, physics graduate students at Cornell University in the US, there really was no escaping…
The Whole Universe Catalog
A seemingly endless variety of food was sprawled over several tables at the home of Judith L. Baxter and her…
Charting the history of western art with math
For more than a century, researchers have used statistics to study writing style in a sort of literary forensics…
Can an Equation be a Poem?
April is Mathematics Awareness Month. April is alsoNational Poetry Month. Coincidence? Yep, almost definitely. But it’s also an opportunity: I’d like…
Two Guys Dancing about Math
A typical performance by dancers Karl Schaffer and Erik Stern begins with a handshake. However, it’s not simple: the…
Foraging flights
First, he tracked basking sharks—filterfeeding leviathans that look like supersized great whites—in the coastal waters near Great Britain, and then…
Descartes’ Decipherer
Erik-Jan Bos, a philosopher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, unearthed research gold with an Internet search. In putting together…