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How Quickly Can You Fill Up a Circle?
This post originally appeared on scientificamerican.com.
Michael Boshernitzan, a math professor at my graduate school alma mater, Rice University, passed away last week. I took one class with him, but he had a larger impact in my life as my spouse Jon Chaika’s advisor. They had a wonderful advisor-student relationship, and I know Jon especial [...]
Young People’s Singing flyers
This is a place where Utah Sacred Harp singers can find copies of a flyer and a poster for the all-day singing we are hosting at the end of September.
Flyer (prints 2 per page)
Poster (prints 1 per page)
Lots of people in Utah are looking for a family-friendly, free activity that engages the body, mind, and spirit and lets them connect with o [...]
In Praise of Chicago’s Hypotenu...
This post originally appeared at scientificamerican.com.
My neighborhood isn’t exactly sleepy, but the traffic isn’t too bad. Sometimes I can even cross intersections diagonally while I take a walk. On one recent walk, I started wondering how much distance I save myself with my little hypotenuse trick, so when I got home I measured our [...]
Mathematical Mondegreens
This post originally appeared at scientificamerican.com.
I transcribe every episode of My Favorite Theorem, the podcast I cohost with Kevin Knudson. It’s important for accessibility (and yes, I do judge you if you publish a podcast with no transcript, especially if you have a decent budget), but I’ve also found that a lot of hearing people pr [...]
Should We Eat Less Rice?
This post originally appeared at scientificamerican.com.
“Your Bowl of Rice Is Hurting the Climate Too” reads a Bloomberg headline from June. “Rice cultivation could be as bad for global warming as 1,200 coal plants, so why aren’t consumers more bothered? Eco-conscious consumers are giving up meat and driving electric cars to do their part fo [...]
The Longest Matrilineal Chain in Math
This post originally appeared on scientificamerican.com.
The Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) is a website that collects information about the advisors and students of PhD mathematicians. It can be fun to waste a little time clicking around the site, finding famous ancestors (I’m one of Leonhard Euler’s 113,581 known mathematical descendan [...]
The Only Way to Win Is Not to Play th...
When I became a math and science writer, I had no idea that one of the most common requests I would get would be to weigh in on order of operations problems that somehow go viral in some segment of the internet. The latest one I’ve seen is 8÷2(2+2).
My favorite headline for this one: “Viral math problem baffles mathematicians, physicist [...]
Chasing Completeness
The University of Utah, where I used to work, is built into the foothills on the east side of Salt Lake City. It is at a higher elevation than most of the city, so of course to get there one has to gain elevation. As a bicycle commuter, I was interested in gaining elevation in the least difficult way possible. Eventually I did find a route I [...]
Diagonalizing the Psalms
This post first appeared on scientificamerican.com.
As I was drifting off to sleep one night, I had one of those brilliant ideas that only comes along when you’re drifting off to sleep: diagonalizing the psalms. Earlier that day I had noticed that Psalm 119 was very long—longer than 119 verses, in fact—and wondered how many psalms from the Bo [...]
Parallels and Perpendiculars in the L...
This post first appeared at scientificamerican.com.
André Weil. Credit: Konrad Jacobs Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0 DE)
A friend who recently defended his dissertation in comparative literature mentioned Simone Weil’s writing on the Iliad in his defense. Afterwards, I told him her brother André was a famous mathematician. (In my former field of re [...]
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