Stories about math and mathematicians.
I’m proud to announce that my book Math Art: Truth, Beauty, and Equations, will be published in April 2019 by Sterling. A preview of the book was published in the August 2018 issue of Scientific American. Shown here: Aurora Australis by Carlo H. Séquin.
Math Art: Truth, Beauty, and Equations Read More »
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 step is familiar to geometry students: Draw an equilateral triangle and a regular pentagon so their vertices touch the circle and the two shapes share one vertex. In addition to text directions, the Elements included diagrams that
Researchers find history in the diagrams of Euclid’s Elements Read More »
When he was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, teachers and parents told Helaman Ferguson he would have to choose between art and science. The two fields inhabited different realms, and doing one left no room for the other. “If you can do science and have a lick of sense, you’d better,” he recalled
Creating sculpture with math Read More »
Optimization is the mathematical quest for the best way to do something, from finding the shortest distance between two places to figuring out the best way to pack a suitcase. It often involves calculating the highest or lowest value of something. The applications are far-reaching. To Bosch, they also offered a pleasing aesthetic. “I wanted
Solving a math problem to create art Read More »
For Alex Alemi and Matt Bierbaum, physics graduate students at Cornell University in the US, there really was no escaping the zombies – those fictional reanimated human corpses that feast on the living. In autumn 2011 they were required to complete a project for a class on statistical mechanics taught at Cornell by James Sethna
A seemingly endless variety of food was sprawled over several tables at the home of Judith L. Baxter and her husband, mathematician Stephen D. Smith, in Oak Park, Ill., on a cool Friday evening in September 2011. Canapés, homemade meatballs, cheese plates and grilled shrimp on skewers crowded against pastries, pâtés, olives, salmon with dill
The Whole Universe Catalog Read More »
For more than a century, researchers have used statistics to study writing style in a sort of literary forensics technique called stylometry. In 1901, physicist T. C. Mendenhall famously measured word-length frequency in William Shakespeare’s works and reported that the writer’s style was awfully close to that of fellow writer Christopher Marlowe, fueling rumors
Charting the history of western art with math Read More »
April is Mathematics Awareness Month. April is alsoNational Poetry Month. Coincidence? Yep, almost definitely. But it’s also an opportunity: I’d like to propose that we—you and I, at least until the end of this blog post—merge the two and celebrate the first-ever Mathematical Poetry Month. No fooling. Connecting math to poetry isn’t a new idea. Archimedes
Can an Equation be a Poem? Read More »
A typical performance by dancers Karl Schaffer and Erik Stern begins with a handshake. However, it’s not simple: the two men fail to connect, missing hands and falling past each other, over and over, in a variety of ways. When they do finally grasp hands, they have to face the opposite problem: they’re unable
Two Guys Dancing about Math Read More »
First, he tracked basking sharks—filterfeeding leviathans that look like supersized great whites—in the coastal waters near Great Britain, and then Atlantic cod, leatherback turtles, Magellanic penguins, and bigeye tuna. He’s wrangled and tagged ocean sunfish, blue sharks, and shortfin mako sharks (and claims success by the fact that he still has all his fingers). Only after David Sims had exhausted many
