Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

For the 5th and final Thursday of June we will once again take a look at some of the goodness over on our facebook page, and oh my goodness what a huge load of goodness we have indeed! For an appetizer, how about this little visual problem posted by ThinkFun Games? (If you remind me in the comments, I’ll tell you the neat way I thought about solving it.)

The shape consists of overlapped color circles.  Which two colors have their total visible areas equal? (click to enlarge)

Now onto the main course. I have to show you this incredible new math art tool called SLICEFORM STUDIO. Click over and check out their gallery to begin with. Just gorgeous.

My first creation on SliceForm.com

There’s a tutorial page as well, but the best thing to do is probably just to start playing with the app itself.  DIG IN! The site is sort of made for people who can use laser cutters to do the paper and stuff, but you can also just click “trace and export strips” and then color it in and export the image. On the right, you can see my first creation. Email yours to mathmunchteam@gmail.com and we’ll stick it in our readers’ gallery.

Mathematical Artist Rinus Roelofs

Alright, up next is an amazing mathematical artist by the name of Rinus Roelofs. (You might remember the paper project of his that we shared at new year.) Well, Rinus is just an unblievable and prolific maker of incredible and beautiful things. Check out his website. (He has two, I think)

I follow Rinus on facebook, and he’s always posting pictures of his works in progress, and they are stunning. First, check out this gallery of Interwoven Ring Patterns he recently posted. Then take a look at his timeline photos. Lots of overlapping patterns and Möbius shapes.

A completed galaxy puzzle.  Each colored area has rotational symmetry

Finally, have you ever heard of Galaxy Puzzles?  I hadn’t either, but you can find lots of them over on the wonderful puzzling site, krazydad. The puzzle begins with lots of dots, and your goal is to separate the dots by making enclosures that have 180 degree rotational symmetry. Print and play galaxy puzzles are available as well as an interactive online version. There are lots of other puzzles available as well, but I think Battleships is a pretty cool. You might give that a try too.

But wait, there’s more. With 5 Thursdays in a month, there’s just lots to share, so you also get some bonus stuff!

• A gallery of stunning images of “impossible figures”
• A mathematical poem (based on a Robert Frost classic)
• A video about some very cool new dice from The Dice Lab

That’s it for June. See you next time. Bon appetit!

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch! For the final Thursday of May, we’ll be looking back at some of this month’s posts from our Facebook page. We’ll see some wordless videos by The Global Math Project, look at a prime number quiz game, and meet Fan Chung Graham, one of the world’s leading mathematicians.

I don’t know much about The Global Math Project, but I know James Tanton is involved, and that is always a good thing. (Remember his Exploding Dots?) Well, they’ve posted a couple of wonderful videos featuring Tanton’s “math without words.” Need I say more? See for yourself.

If you like those, here are some more math without words from Tanton’s website.

Up next is a neat little thing by Christian Lawson-Perfect from The Aperiodical. Christian bought isthisprime.com and set up a little quiz game. Click over and see for yourself how it goes… I’ll wait… click below…

It’s good practice for divisibility tests and getting your prime recognition up, but I suppose it’s not all that mathematical, is it? But Christian did something interesting. He recorded data from all the games played, and he wrote a summary of the results. I love all the charts and graphs in there. The one below shows how likely a number is to be missed by players.

Finally, I hadn’t heard of Fan Chung-Graham until I found an interview of her posted on Facebook. She is one of the world’s leading mathematicians in several fields, and though she recently retired, she still conducts some research. The interview is a little academic, but it’s still nice to get to know such a talented mathematician.

Well that wraps up the week and month. I hope you’ve found some tasty math.  Have a great week and bon appetite!