Author Archives: Justin Lanier

Faces, Blackboards, and Dancing PhDs

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

What does a mathematician look like? What does a mathematician do? Here are a couple of things I ran across recently that give a window into what it’s like to be a professional research mathematician—someone who works on figuring out new math as their job.

Gary Davis, who blogs over at Republic of Mathematics, recently posted a short piece that challenges stereotypes about mathematicians. It’s called What does a mathematician look like?

Who here is a mathematician? Click through to find out!

Gary’s point is that you can’t tell who is or isn’t a mathematician just by looking at them. Mathematicians come from every background and heritage. Gary followed up on this idea in another post where he highlighted some notable mathematicians who are black women. Here’s a website called Black Women in Mathematics that shares some biographies and history. And here’s a link to the Infinite Possibilities Conference, a yearly gathering “designed to promote, educate, encourage and support minority women interested in mathematics and statistics.” Suzanne Weekes, one of the five mathematicians pictured above, was a speaker at this conference in 2010.

Richard Tapia, another of the mathematicians above, is featured in the following video. His life story both inspires and delights.

And what does this diversity of mathematicians do all day? Well, one thing they do is talk to each other about math! And though there are many new technologies that help people to do and share and collaborate on mathematics (like blogs!), it’s hard to beat a handy chalkboard as a scribble pad for sharing ideas.

At Blackboard of the Day, Mathieu Rémy and Sylvain Lumbroso share the results of these impromptu math jam sessions. Every day they post a photograph of a blackboard covered in doodles and calculations and sketches of ideas. The website is in French, but the mathematical pictures are a universal language.

Diana Davis, putting the finishing touches on a blackboard masterpiece

Sharing mathematical ideas can take many forms, and sometimes choosing the right medium can make all the difference. Mathematicians use pictures, words, symbols, sculptures, movies, songs—even dances! Let me point you to the “Dance your Ph.D.” Contest. It’s exactly what it sounds like—people sharing the ideas of their dissertations (their first big piece of original work) through dance. Entries come in from physicists, chemists, biologists, and more. Below you’ll find an entry by Diana Davis, a mathematician who completed her dissertation at Brown University this past spring. Diana often studies regular polgyons and especially ways of “dissecting” them—breaking them up into pieces in interesting ways.

Thanks to The Aperiodical—a great math blog—for sharing Diana’s wonderful video!

Some pages from Diana’s notebooks

All kinds of mathematicians study math and share it in so many ways. It’s like a never-ending math buffet!

Bon appetit!

Posted by Justin Lanier. Categories: Math Munch. Tags: dance, diversity, doodling, geometry, history, mathematicians, topology, video. 3 Comments

Jun. ’12

Music Box, FatFonts, and the Yoshimoto Cube

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

The Whitney Music Box

Jim Bumgardner

Solar Beat

With the transit of Venus just behind us and the summer solstice just ahead, I’ve got the planets and orbits on my mind. I can’t believe I haven’t yet shared with you all the Whitney Music Box. It’s the brainchild of Jim Bumgardner, a man of many talents and a “senior nerd” at Disney Interactive Labs. His music box is one of my favorite things ever–so simple, yet so mesmerizing.

It’s actually a bunch of different music boxes–variations on a theme. Colored dots orbit in circles, each with a different frequency, and play a tone when they come back to their starting points. In Variation 0, for instance, within the time it takes for the largest dot to orbit the center once, the smallest dot orbits 48 times. There are so many patterns to see–and hear! There are 21 variations in all. Go nuts! In this one, only prime dots are shown. What do you notice?

You can find a more astronomical version of this idea at SolarBeat.

Above you’ll find a list of the numerals from 1 to 9. Or is it 0 to 9?

Where’s the 0 you ask? Well, the idea behind FatFonts is that the visual weight of a number is proportional to its numerical size. That would mean that 0 should be completely white!

FatFonts can also be nested. The first number below is 64. Can you figure out the second?

This is 64 in FatFonts.

What number is this?
Click to zoom!

FatFonts was developed by the team of Miguel Nacenta, Uta Hinrichs, and Sheelagh Carpendale. You can see some uses that FatFonts has been put to on their Gallery page, and even download FatFonts to use in your word processor. Move over, Times New Roman!

This past week, Paul pointed me to this cool video by George Hart about interlocking complementary polyhedra that together form a cube. It reminded me of something I saw for the first time a few years ago that just blew me away. You have to see the Yoshimoto Cube to believe it:

In addition to its more obvious charms, something that delights me about the Yoshimoto Cube is how it was found so recently–only in 1971, by Naoki Yoshimoto. (That other famous cube was invented in 1974 by Ernő Rubik.) How can it be that simple shapes can be so inexhaustible? If you’re feeling inspired, Make Magazine did a short post on the Yoshimoto Cube a couple of years that includes a template for making a Yoshimoto Cube out of paper. Edit: These template and instructions aren’t great. See below for better ones!

Since it’s always helpful to share your goals to help you stick to them, I’ll say that this week I’m going to make a Yoshimoto Cube of my own. Begone, back burner! Later in the week I’ll post some pictures below. If you decide to make one, share it in the comments or email us at

MathMunchTeam@gmail.com

We’d love to hear from you.

Bon appetit!

Update:

Here are the two stellated rhombic dodecahedra that make the Yoshimoto Cube that Paul and I made! Templates, instructions, and video to follow!

Here are two different templates for the Yoshimoto cubelet. You’ll need eight cubelets to make one star.

And here’s how you tape them together:

Posted by Justin Lanier. Categories: Math Munch. Tags: art, building, music, numbers, origami, polyhedra, primes, spirals, video. 10 Comments

May. ’12

Slides and Twists, Life in Life, and Star Art

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

I ran across the most wonderful compendium of slidey and twisty puzzles this past week when sharing the famous 15-puzzle with one of my classes. It’s called Jaap’s Puzzle Page and it’s run by a software engineer from the Netherlands named Jaap Scherphuis. Jaap has been running his Puzzle Page since 1999.

Jaap Scherphuis
and some of his many puzzles

Jaap first encountered hands-on mathematical puzzles when he was given a Rubik’s Cube as a present when he was 8 or 9. He now owns over 700 different puzzles!

Jaap’s catalogue of slidey and twisty puzzles is immense and diverse. Each puzzle is accompanied by a picture, a description, a mathematical analysis, and–SPOILER ALERT–an algorithm that you can use to solve it!

On top of this, all of the puzzles in Jaap’s list with asterisks (*) next to them have playable Java applets on their pages–for instance, you can play Rotascope or Diamond 8-Ball. Something that’s especially neat about Jaap’s applets is that you can sometimes customize their size/difficulty. If you find the 15-puzzle daunting, you can start with the 8-puzzle or even the 3-puzzle instead. The applets also have a built in solver. I really enjoy watching the solver crank through solving a puzzle–it’s so relentless, and sometimes you can see patterns emerge.

Over ten solves, I found that the autosolve for the 15-puzzle averaged 7.1 seconds. How long do you think on average the 63-puzzle would take to solve?

You can read more about Jaap in this interview on speedcubing.com or on his about page.

The 15-puzzle

Rotascope

Diamond 8-ball

Next, I recently read about an amazing feat: Brice Due created a copy of Conway’s Game of Life inside of a Game of Life! This video shows you what it’s all about. It starts zoomed in on some activity, following the rules of Life. The it zooms out to show that this activity conspires to make a large unit cell that is “turned on.” This large cell was dubbed a “OTCA metapixel” by its creator, where OTCA stands for Outer Totalistic Cellular Automata.

Finally, the video zooms out even more to show that this cell and others around it interact according to the rules of Life! The activity at the meta-level that is shown at the end exactly corresponds to the activity on the micro-level that we began with. Check it out!

This metapixel idea has been around since 2006, but the video was created just recently by Philip Bradbury. It was made using Golly, a cellular automata explorer that is one of my favorite mathematical tools.

Last up, some star art! (STart? STARt? st-art?) It turns out that the Math Munch team members all converged toward doing some StArT this semester as a part of our mathematical art (MArTH) seminar. Here is some of our work, for your viewing pleasure. Bon appetit!