Stick figures jumping on Rhode Island, part of an xkcd what-if post by Randall Munroe.
The semester is over (sorry, quarter system folks, but you can get your revenge in August and September), and you just want to put your feet up and surf the Internet. Of course, there are lots of ways you might accidentally learn something while you do that [...]
Monthly archives for May, 2014
Fermi Estimation with Liquid Mercury ...
Stick figures jumping on Rhode Island, part of an xkcd what-if post by Randall Munroe.
The semester is over (sorry, quarter system folks, but you can get your revenge in August and September), and you just want to put your feet up and surf the Internet. Of course, there are lots of ways you might accidentally learn something while you do that [...]
A Higher Murder Rate than New York an...
Non-Violence, a sculpture by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd in Malmö, Sweden. Image: Francois Polito, via Wikimedia Commons.
Today on the radio, I heard an announcer say, “Chicago has a higher murder rate than New York and Los Angeles combined.” The compassionate human being in me cringed, and the statistical pedant in me also cringed. [...]
MoMA to MoMath: A Mathematician’...
Charles James (American, born Great Britain, 1906–1978) Evening Dress, 1946 Black silk-rayon velvet, red silk satin, brown silk faille, black silk crepe The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Arturo and Paul Peralta-Ramos, 1954 (2009.300. [...]
Nothing is More Fun than a Hypercube ...
More Fun than a Hypercube of Monkeys, a sculpture by Henry Segerman and Will Segerman.
Monkeys! Mathematical groups! 4-dimensional geometry! Together at last!
This sculpture, called More Fun than a Hypercube of Monkeys, answers an open question: has the quaternion group ever appeared as the symmetry group of an object? Thanks to mathematician [...]
Sniffing Out Theorems
Hector the dog is probably not sniffing out theorems. Image: SaudS, via Wikimedia Commons.
Patrick Stevens is an undergraduate mathematics student at the University of Cambridge, and I’ve really been enjoying his blog recently. He’s been doing a series of posts about discovering proofs of standard real analysis theorems. He writes that the se [...]
Happy Birthday, Evelyn Boyd Granville...
Evelyn Boyd Granville in 1997. Photo by Margaret Murray, via Mathematicians of the African Diaspora by Scott W. Williams.
Evelyn Boyd Granville, the second African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, turns 90 today (May 1, 2014).
Although Granville was one of the only black students at both Smith and Yale, she says she never felt d [...]
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