Monthly archives for October, 2019
Farewell to the Fractional Foot
This post originally appeared at scientificamerican.com.
What an exciting year it has been for units of measure! (Granted, it doesn’t take a lot to be an exciting year for units of measure.) In May, the kilogram got a makeover. The old standard, a piece of platinum-iridium alloy housed at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Fr [...]
It’s Factoradical!
This post originally appeared on scientificamerican.com.
The word “factoradic” jumped out to me when I peeked over a new math friend’s shoulder and saw it in the title of the paper she was revising. What a great word! I had no idea what it meant.
My new friend showed me with an example: the number 2019 is 2(6!)+4(5!)+4(4!)+2!+1. Or more forma [...]
Hilbert Walked So the Clay Institute ...
This post originally appeared on scientificamerican.com.
I’ve been reading up on Hilbert’s problems recently. They’re the 23 problems presented by German mathematician David Hilbert at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Paris in 1900. (To be more precise, Hilbert presented 10 of them in a talk at the congress. The full list [...]
Law & Order: MVT
This post first appeared on scientificamerican.com.
In the criminal justice system, velocity-based offenses are considered especially unimportant. In New York, the dedicated detectives who investigate these minor misdemeanors are members of an elite squad known as the Moving Violation Team. These are their stories.
[Open with aerial shot of t [...]
An Airtight Proof That There Are More...
This post first appeared at scientificamerican.com.
In our latest episode of My Favorite Theorem, my cohost Kevin Knudson and I talked with Bates College mathematician Adriana Salerno about one of the prettiest theorems there is, Georg Cantor’s proof that there are more real numbers than there are whole numbers. You can listen at kpknudson.co [...]
Recent Comments