Author Archives: Anna Weltman

26

Nov. ’12

Domino Computer, Knitting, and Election MArTH

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

First up this week is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time: the world’s largest computer made out of dominoes.  A computer made out of dominoes?! you say.  How??

The Domputer, as it’s been called, was the great idea of mathematician, teacher, and entertainer Matt Parker (see a previous post about Matt here), and he and many volunteers built it at the Manchester Science Festival at the end of October.

Matt and some of his teammates testing domino circuits.

So, what is a domino computer, and how does it work?  As Matt is quoted saying in a podcast that featured the project, “A domino computer is exactly that: a computer made out of chains of dominoes.  Flicking over one domino sends a signal racing along the chain, just like current flows down a wire.  And then interacting lines of dominoes can manipulate the signal exactly the way circuit components do.”

At its very, very basic level, a computer is a machine that does calculations in binary.  You input some sequence of 0s and 1s by flipping signals on and off, and your input starts a chain of electrical communications that results in an output of 0s and 1s.  Most computers do this with electrical circuits.  But it can also be done with dominoes – sending an “on” signal means flipping a domino over, and sending an “off” signal means not flipping a domino, or having a chain of falling dominoes that becomes blocked and stops falling.

Making the domputer.

There are lots of different kinds of commands that you can send by flipping switches on and off and making those signals interact.  For example, suppose you want something to happen only if two switches are on – if the first switch is on AND the second switch is on.  For this you would need to make something called an “AND gate” – an interaction in chains of current that will continue the chain if both switches are on and will stop the chain if either (or both) is off.  How would you do that with dominoes?  In this video, Matt demonstrates how to make an AND gate out of dominoes: Domino AND gate.  Check out this video for OR (the chain continues if one or the other or both are on) and XOR (“exclusive or,” the chain continues if one or the other, but not both, are on) gates:

Matt’s Domputer does something very simple: it adds numbers in binary.  But, as you might imagine, it was extremely complicated to build!  According to the Manchester Science Festival Twitter feed, the Domputer used about 10,000 dominoes and would take about 13,600 years to do what a normal processor could do in a second.  Wow!

Here it is in action.  It messed up on this calculation (9+3), but succeeded in later attempts – and is fascinating to watch nonetheless!

Awesome!

Next up, we’ve written about mathematical knitting before (remember Wooly Thoughts and the prime factorization sweater?), but here’s a great site I recently found made by mathematician, knitter, and dancer Sarah-Marie Belcastro.

This site is full of articles and about and patterns for all kinds of cool mathematical objects – like Klein bottles (which make great hats, by the way)!  In her post about knitted Klein bottles (and all of the other objects she makes), Sarah-Marie not only describes how to knit the objects but a lot of mathematics about them.  I don’t know about you, but I always find mathematical ideas easier to understand when I can make models of them, or at least read about models being made.  Sarah-Marie does a great job of blending mathematical descriptions with how-to-make-it recipes.

Some other patterns that I love are Sarah-Marie’s 8-colored two-hole torus pants and this knitted trefoil knot.

Finally, are you wondering what to do with all those campaign posters you have left over from the election?  Here’s George Hart’s take on what to do with them:

Bon appetit!

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04

Nov. ’12

Factorization Dance, Vanishing, and Storm Infographics

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Think fast!  How many dots are there in this picture?

This beautiful picture comes to you from Brent Yorgey and Stephen Von Worley.  If you counted the dots, you probably didn’t count them one at a time.  (And, if you did, can you think of another way to count them?)  If you counted them like I did, you noticed that the dots are arranged in rings of five.  Then maybe you noticed that the rings of five are themselves arranged in rings of five.  And then, finally, you may have noticed that those rings are also arranged in rings of five!  How many dots is that?  5x5x5 = 125!

In this blog post, Brent describes how he wrote the computer program that creates these pictures.  The program factors numbers into primes.  Then, starting with the smallest prime factor, the program arranges dots into regular polygons of the appropriate size with dots (or polygons of dots) at the vertices of the polygon.

Here’s how that works for 90.  90’s prime factorization is 2x3x3x5:

As Brent writes in his post, this counting gets much harder to do with numbers that have large prime factors.  For example, here is 183:

From this picture, I can tell that 183 has 3 as a prime factor.  But how many times does 3 go into 183?  It isn’t immediately clear.

When Stephen saw Brent’s creation, he decided the diagrams would be even more awesome if they danced.  And so he created what he calls the Factor Conga.  If you only click on one link today, click that one.  The Factor Conga is beautiful and totally mesmerizing.

For more factor diagrams, check out this post from the Aperiodical.  There’s a link to the factor diagram by Jason Davies that we posted about over the summer.

Next up, a few months ago we posted about the puzzles of Sam Loyd – one of which was a puzzle called Get Off the Earth.  In this puzzle, the Earth spins and – impossibly – one of the men seems to vanish.  This puzzle is a type of illusion called a geometrical vanish.  In a geometrical vanish, an image is chopped into pieces and the pieces are rearranged to make a new image that takes up the same amount of space as the original, but is missing something.

Here’s a video of another geometrical vanish:

No matter the picture, these illusions are baffling for the same reason.  Rearranging the pieces of an image shouldn’t change the image’s area.  And, yet, in these illusions, that’s exactly what seems to happen.

Check out some of these other links to geometrical vanishes.  Print out your own here.  And think about this: Are these illusions math – and, if it so, how?  I came across geometrical vanishes because a friend asked if I thought the Get Off the Earth puzzle was mathematical.  He isn’t convinced.  If you have any ideas that you think can convince him either way, leave them in the comments section!

Finally, the Math Munch team’s home, New York City, (and this writer’s other home, New Jersey) was hit by a hurricane this week.  The city and surrounding areas are still recovering from the storm.  Sandy left millions of people without power and many without homes.  One way people have tried to communicate the magnitude of what happened is to make infographics of the data.  Making a good infographic requires a blend of mathematics, art, and persuasion.  Here some of the most interesting infographics about the storm that I’ve found.  Check out how they use size, placement, and color to communicate information and make comparisons.

This infographic from the New York Times shows the number of power outages in the northeast and their locations in different states. The size of the circle indicates the number of people without power. Why would the makers of this infographic choose circles? Why do you think they chose to place them on a map? What do you think of the overlapping?

This is part of an infographic from the Huffington Post that compares hurricanes Sandy and Katrina. Click on the image to see the rest of the infographic. What conclusions can you draw about the hurricanes from the information?

This is a wind map of the country captured at 10:30 in the morning on October 30th, the day hurricane Sandy hit. The infographic was made by scientist-artists Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. It shows how wind is flowing around the United States in real-time. Check out their site (click on this image) to see what the wind is doing right now in your part of the country!

To those in places affected by Hurricane Sandy, be safe.  To all our readers, bon appetit!

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14

Oct. ’12

Harmonious Sum, Continuous Life, and Pumpkins

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

We’ve posted a lot about pi on Math Munch – because it’s such a mathematically fascinating little number.  But here’s something remarkable about pi that we haven’t yet talked about. Did you know that pi is equal to four times this? Yup.  If you were to add and subtract fractions like this, for ever and ever, you’d get pi divided by 4.  This remarkable fact was uncovered by the great mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who is most famous for developing the calculus.  Check out this interactive demonstration from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project to see how adding more and more terms moves the sum closer to pi divided by four.  (We’ve written about Wolfram before.)

I think this is amazing for a couple of reasons.  First of all, how can an infinite number of numbers add together to make something that isn’t infinite???  Infinitely long sums, or series, that add to a finite number have a special name in mathematics: convergent series.  Another famous convergent series is this one:

The second reason why I think this sum is amazing is that it adds to pi divided by four.  Pi is an irrational number – meaning it cannot be written as a fraction, with whole numbers in the numerator and denominator.  And yet, it’s the sum of an infinite number of rational numbers.

In this video, mathematician Keith Devlin talks about this amazing series and a group of mathematical musicians (or mathemusicians) puts the mathematics to music.

This video is part of a larger work called Harmonious Equations written by Keith and the vocal group Zambra.  Watch the rest of them, if you have the chance – they’re both interesting and beautiful.

Next up, Conway’s Game of Life is a cellular automaton created by mathematician John Conway.  (It’s pretty fun: check out this to download the game, and this Munch where we introduce it.)  It’s discrete – each little unit of life is represented by a tiny square.  What if the rules that determine whether a new cell is formed or the cell dies were applied to a continuous domain?  Then, it would look like this:

Looks like a bunch of cells under a microscope, doesn’t it?  Well, it’s also a cellular automaton, devised by mathematician Stephan Rafler from Nurnberg, Germany.  In this paper, Stephan describes the mathematics behind the model.  If you’re curious about how it works, check out these slides that compare the new continuous version to Conway’s model.

Finally, I just got a pumpkin.  What should I carve in it?  I spent some time browsing the web for great mathematical pumpkin carvings.  Here’s what I found.

A pumpkin carved with a portion of Escher’s Circle Limit.

A pumpkin tiled with a portion of Penrose tiling.

A dodecapumpkin from Vi Hart.

I’d love to hear any suggestions you have for how I should make my own mathematical pumpkin carving!  And, if you carve a pumpkin in a cool math-y way, send a picture over to MathMunchTeam@gmail.com!

Bon appetit!

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