Planets with screwy orbits
Ever since astronomers started finding planets orbiting other stars, they have been learning just how rich and peculiar the cosmos…
Month: January 2011
Nashville’s Clean-Eating Crusader
For CR magazine, I wrote a profile of Randy Pendergrass, a cancer survivor and nutritionist at St. Thomas Hospital here…
Trig Shots
What's the hardest straight-in shot in pool? Mathematician tries to find out in this article for New Scientist. This article…
Million dollar math
My first feature was a piece about unsolved problems in mathematics, published in Discover in 2006. Read it here.
The Perfect Way to Slice a Pizza
Unsolved problems make for good stories. In this case, a couple of mathematicians cracked the little-known "Pizza Conjecture," a rigorous…
Whatever Happened to… Smallpox?
Once the most feared disease on the planet, smallpox killed countless people in the course of human history. The first signs…
The Proof is in the Blogging
In 2006, shortly after Grigory Perelman famously refused the Fields Medal for his proof of the Poincaré Conjecture, a mathematician…
Turning Water into Whiskey at Jack Daniel’s
Some would argue that the water flowing from a fissure in a rock in Moore County, Tennessee, is made for…
Whatever Happened To… Subliminal Advertising?
In 1957, marketing executive James Vicary claimed that during screenings of the film Picnic, the words “eat popcorn” and “drink Coca-Cola”…
Wallpaper for a Hyperbolic World
Frank Farris is a mathematician who has some wild ideas about wallpapering your hyperbolic house. I wrote about him for…