Have you been doing other things and failed to notice the origami world evolve without you? Have you fallen asleep and been left behind? If you want to get caught up on what you’ve been missing in the world of origami, I suggest you visit Hannah’s origami blog, A Soul Made of Paper. She’ll have you caught up in no time.
I especially like giving her blog a shout-out because Hannah is a student of mine. She often comes by my classroom to show me her latest paper creations. I like origami, and I’ve dabbled in it–stuck my toe in the stream, if you will–but Hannah is like a scuba diver in the origami world. She’s loves modular origami, but she’s also great at the artsy curved creations (like origami roses), textures, and tessellations.
If you haven’t clicked over to her blog yet, here are a few more pictures to whet your appetite.
Go get lost at A Soul Made of Paper. Maybe you can join her other 3000 followers on tumblr :-).
*All of the above are Hannah’s pieces and Hannah’s photos.
You’re probably familiar with Vi Hart’s math videos. Less well-known are her father’s math videos. Although I was aware of his mathematical sculpture, I was not aware until today that since August 2012, he has been producing a mathematical video series called mathematical impressions for the Simons Foundation. The 10th in the series is The Mathematics of Juggling. Check it out!
Here’s a “stellar” application of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, created by one of my students. It is a stellated icosahedron made up of 30 individual pieces of paper, all of which have the FTC printed on them. Doesn’t it just make you smile? 🙂
Follow the link to see lots of great pictures made with equations. These pictures are so complicated it makes you wonder, is there any picture we can’t make withequations? My first answer is NO.
Think about vector-based graphics. Vector graphics, for those who’ve never heard the term, are pictures/graphics that are stored as a set of instructions for redrawing the picture rather than as a large array of pixels. You’ve used vector graphics if you have ever used clip-art or used the drawing tools in Microsoft Office, or if you’ve ever used Adobe Illustrator, or Inkscape. The advantages of vector graphics include very small files and infinite loss-less resizeability. How can vector graphics achieve this? Well, like I said, vector graphics are stored as rules not pixels. And by rules, we could just as easily say equations.
So the answer is certainly YES we can make any picture using equations. I think the harder question is can we make any picture using ONE equation? Or one set of parametric equations? Or one implicit equation?
What constraints do we want to impose? Do fractals/iterative/recursive rules count?
I am curious to find out how the creators of these picture-equations came up with them. It seems infeasible to do this by trial and error, given the massive size of these equations.
Oh, and if you haven’t yet seen the Batman Curve, you better go check that out too.
Decorating for fall? Consider creating some beautiful DIY pumpkins with a mathematical flair–perfect for on top of the hearth or next to the porch swing out front :-).
These were created by Messiah College students (my alma mater) and the photo comes by way of Professor Sam Wilcock, my advisor. Go Falcons!
The 87th Carnival of Mathematics has arrived!! Here’s a simple computation for you:
What is the sum of the squares of the first four prime numbers?
That’s right, it’s
Good job. Now, onto the carnival. This is my first carnival, so hopefully I’ll do all these posts justice. We had lots of great submissions, so I encourage you to read through this with a fine-toothed comb. Enjoy!
Rants
Here’s a post (rant) from Andrew Taylor regarding the coverage from the BBC and the Guardian on the Supermoon that occurred in March 2011. NASA reports the moon as being 14% larger and 30% brighter, but Andrew disagrees. Go check out the post, and join the conversation.
Have you ever heard someone abuse the phrase “exponentially better”? I know I have. One incorrect usage occurs when someone makes the claim that something is “exponentially better” based on only two data points. Rebecka Peterson has some words for you here, if you’re the kind of person who says this!
John D. Cook highlights a question you’ve probably heard before: Should you walk or run in the rain? An active discussion is going on in the comments section. It’s been discussed in many other places too, including twice on Mythbusters. (I feel like I read an article in an MAA or NCTM magazine on this topic once, as well. Anyone remember that?)
Murray Bourne submitted this awesome post about modeling fish stocks. Murray says his post is an “attempt to make mathematical modeling a bit less scary than in most textbooks.” I think he achieves his goal in this thorough development of a mathematical model for sustainable fisheries (see the graph above for one of his later examples of a stable solution under lots of interesting constraints). If I taught differential equations, I would absolutely use his examples.
Last week I highlighted this new physics blog, but I wanted to point you there again: Go check out Five Minute Physics! A few more videos have been posted, and also a link to this great video about the physics of a dropping Slinky (see above).
Statistics, Probability, & Combinatorics
Mr. Gregg analyzes European football using the Poisson distribution in his post, The Table Never Lies. I liked how much real world data he brought to the discussion. And I also liked that he admitted when his model worked and when it didn’t–he lets you in on his own mathematical thought process. As you read this post, you too will find yourself thinking out loud with Mr. Gregg.
Card Colm has written this excellent post that will help you wrap your mind around the number of arrangements of cards in a deck. It’s a simple high school-level topic, but he really puts it into perspective:
the number of possible ways to order or permute just the hearts is 13!=6,227,020,800. That’s about what the world population was in 2002. So back then if somebody could have made a list of all possible ways to arrange those 13 cards in a row, there would have been enough people on the planet for everyone to get one such permutation.
I think it’s good to remind ourselves that whenever we shuffle the deck, we can be almost certain that our arrangement has never been created before (since arrangements are possible). Wow!
Alex is looking for “random” numbers by simply asking people. Go contribute your own “random” number here. Can’t wait to see the results!
Quick! Think of an example of a real-world bimodal distribution! Maybe you have a ready example if you teach stat, but here’s a really nice example from Michael Lugo: Book prices. Before you read his post, you should make a guess as to why the book prices he looked at are bimodal (see histogram above).
Philosophy and History of Math
Mike Thayer just attended the NCTM conference in Philadelphia and brings us a thoughtful reaction in his post, The Learning of Mathematics in the 21st Century. Mike wrote this post because he had been left with “an ambivalent feeling” after the conference. He wants to “engage others in mathematics education in discussions about ways to improve what we do outside of the frameworks that are being imposed on us by those outside of our field.” As a secondary educator, I agree with Mike completely and really enjoyed his post. Mike isn’t satisfied with where education is going. In his post, he writes, “We are leaping ahead into the unknown with new educational models, and we never took the time to get the old ones right.”
Edmund Harriss asks Have we ever lost mathematics? He gives a nice recap of foundational crises throughout the history of mathematics, and wonders, ultimately, if we’ve actually lost any mathematics. There’s also a short discussion in the comments section which I recommend to you.
Peter Woit reflects on 25 Years of Topological Quantum Field Theory. Maybe if you have degree in math and physics you might appreciate this post. It went over my head a bit, I’m afraid!
Book Reviews
In this post, Matt reviews a 2012 book release, Who’s #1, by Amy N. Langville and Carl D. Meyer. The book discusses the ranking systems used by popular websites like Amazon or Netflix. His review is thorough and balanced–Matt has good things to say about the book, but also delivers a bit of criticism for their treatment of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Thanks for this contribution, Matt! [edit: Thanks MATT!]
Shecky R reviews of David Berlinski’s 2011 book, One, Two Three…Absolutely Elementary mathematics in his Brief Berlinski Book Blurb. I’m not sure his review is an *endorsement*. It sounds like a book that only a small eclectic crowd will enjoy.
Peter Rowlett also weighs in on the recent news about a German high school boy who has (reportedly) solved an open problem. Many news sources have picked up on this, and I’ve only followed the news from a distance. So I was grateful for Peter’s comments–he questions the validity of the news in his recent post “Has schoolboy genius solved problems that baffled mathematicians for centuries?” His comments in another recent post are perhaps even more important though–Peter encourages us to think of ways we can remind our students that lots of open problems still exist, and “Mathematics is an evolving, alive subject to which you could contribute.”
Jess Hawke IS *Heptagrin Girl*
Here’s a fun-loving post about Heptagrins, and all the crazy craft projects you can do with them. Don’t know what a Heptagrin is? Neither did I. But go check out Jess Hawke’s post and she’ll tell you all about them!
Any Lewis Carroll lovers out there? Julia Collins submitted a post entitled “A Night in Wonderland” about a Lewis Carroll-themed night at the National Museum of Scotland. She writes, “Other people might be interested in the ideas we had and also hearing about what a snark is and why it’s still important.” When you check out this post, you’ll not only learn about snarks but also about creating projective planes with your sewing machine. Cool!
Mike Croucher over at Walking Randomly gives a shout out to the free software Octave, which is a MATLAB replacement. Check out his post, here. MATLAB is ridiculously expensive, and so the world needs an alternative like Octave. He provides links to the Kickstarter campaign–and Mike has backed the project himself. I too believe in Octave. I’ve used it a few times for my grad work and I’ve been very grateful for a free alternative to MATLAB.
The End
Okay, that’s it for the 87th Carnival of Mathematics. Hope you enjoyed all the posts! Sorry it took me a couple days to post it–there was a lot to digest :-).
If you missed the previous carnival (#86), you can find it here. The next carnival (#88) will be hosted by Christian at checkmyworking.com. For a complete listing of all the carnivals, and more information & FAQ about the carnivals, follow this link.
Geek mom author Helene McLaughlin reviews this great geeky book about the mathematics of 92 (!!) different kinds of pasta [hat tip to Tim Chase]:
When mixing flour, egg, salt and water to make pasta, I’d guess the only math you consider is how many minutes you have left before the kids will be begging for dinner. I’d guess that you never really contemplated the mathematical beauty of that rigatoni or cavatappi that you are eating. Thats not the way George L. Legendre eats pasta.
In an effort to bring order to the possible chaos of cooking, George L. Legendre takes cooking geek to the next level with his unique book, “Pasta by Design“. Legendre takes 92 of the most familiar types of pasta, categorizes them, determines the complex mathematical equation describing the shape and shows us incredibly intricate computer models for each type of pasta.
I’ve been motivated by George Hart and Zachary Abel to make my own mathematical sculpture with found objects :-). A few former students dropped by to visit me this afternoon and I put them to work making this (they had no where to be, right!?):
A cardboard stellated icosahedron
It’s a stellated icosahedron, made out of these little triangular pyramids. I did not make the pyramids, they came to me this way. Can you guess what their original purpose was?
Pop quiz: What do you think this is??
My wife and I redid our kitchen a few years ago, and I saved twenty of these from (did you guess it yet?) the packaging our cabinets came in. For each cabinet, there are 8 of these keeping the corners safe. The construction process was pretty straight forward, but here are some photos documenting the event.
Construction begins
Every vertex looks like this on the inside.
Almost done!
The last piece goes on.
Here are some more views of the icosahedron. The icosahedron has a symmetry group of size 60.
There are 15 pairs of opposite edges, each with 2-fold symmetry (for a total of 15 orientations, not counting the identity)
There are 10 pairs of opposite faces, each with 3-fold symmetry (for a total of 20 orientations, not counting the identity)
There are 6 pairs of opposite vertices, each with 5-fold symmetry (for a total of 24 orientations, not counting the identity)
So (1 identity) + (15 edge symmetries) + (20 face symmetries) + (24 vertex symmetries) = 60 total orientations.
Now I just need to find a large enough Christmas tree upon which to put this giant star!
You’re probably familiar with 
arrangements are possible). Wow!
“. Legendre takes 92 of the most familiar types of pasta, categorizes them, determines the complex mathematical equation describing the shape and shows us incredibly intricate computer models for each type of pasta.
Random Walks 