Posts in category Blog on Blogs
Complex Projective 4-Space
A visualization of the complex function (z/2)^7-1, with the 7 Antarcticas showing where the roots of the function are. Image: Adam P. Goucher.
Complex Projective 4-Space recently celebrated its first birthday, and I was surprised to learn it was that young. I’ve been reading since January or so, and I guess I just assumed it had been ar [...]
You Get Calculus! And You Get Calculu...
Gabriel’s Horn, which has infinite surface area and finite volume and is one of my favorite examples in calculus. Image: Public domain, by RokerHRO via Wikimedia Commons.
Textbooks are too expensive. The price is often “what the consumer will bear,” and the student is stuck bearing outrageous prices because the alternative i [...]
Tangled Up in Low-Dimensional Topolog...
Knots and tangles. In a post about “tangle machines,” Daniel Moskovich imagines trying to explain to an educated non-mathematician what he studies: “Why knots? Do I want to tie ships to their moorings more securely?”Image: public domain, from Nordisk Familjebok, via Projekt Runeberg, and Wikimedia Commons.
Low Dimensio [...]
A Tasty Geometric Morsel Every Day
#426 Tectonic Activity. Image copyright Tilman Zitzmann. Used with permission.
It’s fun to look through the Geometry Daily archives and notice similarities between designs published around the same time. Tilman seems to have had a hexagon phase in the 320’s, and you can definitely see the designs getting more complex but also more [...]
Platonic Solids, Symmetry, and the Fo...
The icosidodecahedron, a solid “halfway through” the transition from the dodecahedron to its dual, the icosahedron. Image: Tomruen, via Wikipedia. Created using Robert Webb’s Great Stella software.
On his blog Azimuth, John Baez has been posting a series called “Symmetry and the Fourth Dimension.” He writes: R [...]
The Poetry of Calculus
A cylindrical silo in South Dakota, perhaps the basis of a related rates problem in calculus. Image: flickr user Lars Plougmann
“Facing a streetlight under batty moths
And June bugs racheting like broken clock springs,
I stand, for the sake of a problem, on the curb—
Neither in grass nor gutter—while those wings
Switch down the light an [...]
Celebrating the Grandmothers of STEM
Astrophysicist Carol Jo Crannell, mathematician Annalisa Crannell, and Iolanthe Good, three generations of women who love STEM. Image: Ximena Catepillan.
In honor of my grandmother’s birthday last Thursday, I wrote about Grandma Got STEM, a blog that collects stories of older women in science careers.
Some have had illustrious careers a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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