Columbia College Chicago instructor Ann Hanson and two of her students generously shared artwork they made using the geometric figure the “Lute of Pythagoras.”
A drawing by Joseph Koch incorporates the Lute of Pythagoras into a portrait of Pythagoras himself. Image copyright Joseph Koch. Used with permission.
The ancient mathemati [...]
Monthly archives for May, 2013
Strumming the Lute of Pythagoras
Columbia College Chicago instructor Ann Hanson and two of her students generously shared artwork they made using the geometric figure the “Lute of Pythagoras.”
A drawing by Joseph Koch incorporates the Lute of Pythagoras into a portrait of Pythagoras himself. Image copyright Joseph Koch. Used with permission.
The ancient mathemati [...]
On Pregnancy and Probability
I have never been pregnant, but from what I understand, it is full of bizarre cravings, frequent bathroom breaks, and a smorgasbord of medical scans and tests. This last part is what concerns Kate Owens. She is a visiting assistant professor in the math department at the College of Charleston, and she is also pregnant with her second child. [...]
This Week in Number Theory
A visualization of the twin primes using an Ulam spiral. Created by Silveira Neto and shared under a Creative Commons-attribution-share alike license.
The week of May 12 was pretty big for number theory. I wrote about some of the blog coverage of the two major results.
By now you’ve probably heard the announcements of two big results in numbe [...]
Goldbach Variations
In mid-May, Harald Helfgott of the École Normale Supériure in Paris published a proof of the ternary Goldbach conjecture, a longstanding question in number theory.
Harald Helfgott, who finished the proof of the ternary Goldbach conjecture. Image: Harald Helfgott.
Of course, making substantial progress on a problem that some of the most brilli [...]
Binary Bonsai and Other Mathematical ...
A “binary bonsai” created using an algorithmic knitting process. Image copyright Madeleine Shepherd. Used with permission.
Many of us have seen Fibonacci numbers in sunflowers and hyperbolic curvature in kale leaves. Botanica Mathematica, “a textile taxonomy of mathematical plant forms,” takes mathematical-botanical correspondences like these [...]
Award-Winning Teachers Put Math on Ha...
A mathematical hat made by Patrick Honner’s students as part of an award-winning lesson plan. Image: Patrick Honner.
Many math teachers have a hands-on approach to their subject, but those hands aren’t usually covered in finger paint. Scott Goldthorp, however, sometimes teaches messy math classes. Goldthorp, a teacher at Rosa Internatio [...]
Big Numbers Are Big
Image: xkcd
So if you’re worried that human creativity is worthless because every possible piece of literature, the MP3 of every song anyone will ever sing, the choreography of every ballet, along with the DNA of every person who will ever perform it, is encoded in pi, don’t despair. No one with any sense will be switching to a pi-mining stra [...]
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