Posts in category Roots of Unity
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 [...]
Ping-Pong for Introverts
This post originally appeared on scientificamerican.com.
Ping-pong is great, but there’s a catch: you have to play with someone else. What is a committed introvert to do?
You could always hit the ball against some fixed object, but as Mitch Hedberg observed about tennis (easily generalized to other hit-a-ball games), you’ll never be as good a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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