Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Dearing Wang

First up is a wonderful mathematical artist I found on instagram, under the name dearing_draws. Click to see the wonderful work of Dearing Wang. The instagram stream includes lots of timelapse videos showing the creation of the images, which is lovely, but even better is that Dearing has a youtube channel and a website devoted to teaching people how to make their own!! You should click over and follow a tutorial. Make something beautiful and send us a picture.

3 Fish in a Pond Tutorial Video

The Diamond Wedge Pattern Tutorial Video

Impossible Octagon Tutorial Video

Another great thing about Dearing’s website is that he has a page where you can print out blank sheets to color, if that’s your thing. Not quite as mathematical, maybe, but it is nice. I like to color sometimes, and if you color systematically, maybe symmetrically, then it’s fairly mathematical after all. UPDATE: Dearing has agreed to let us host some some of his coloring sheets on Math Munch.  Click here for easily downloadable sheets to color.

John Edmark

Up next is another mathematical artist, John Edmark, a designer and adjunct professor at Stanford University. I was introduced to John’s incredible work through the following video. Just watch and let your jaw hit the floor in amazement.

This is a video of a zoetrope. The pieces spin and the camera shutter is timed to only show certain points in their rotation. What we see is sort of like a little loop of film showing us several frames of the animation. It’s impressive that John put all those frames together into sculptures that are beautiful, even when they’re not spinning.

PatTurn

But that isn’t all, there’s lots more to see on John’s website. I found his spiral videos pretty mesmerizing and fantastic. I also really like his artist statement, which begins “If change is the only constant in nature, it is written in the language of geometry.” I also just really like hearing artists talk about their work, because it’s a sort of behind the scenes look into their creative process and thinking.

(3D printable files are also available here for the incredibly fortunate among us with access to a 3D printer.)

An Octothorpe

Finally, if you like solving riddles and puzzles, check out The Octothorpean Order. This is sort of an online puzzle hunt, with clues and tips on the website. You can read about it, but the best thing to do is dive in and start solving puzzles. You probably have to create a user name, but it’s good fun. I recommend it.

By the way,  “octothorpe” is the technical word for the “hashtag” or “pound” or “number sign.” It means eight fields, and I think it represents a farmers house in the middle and eight fields arround it. Cool right?

Here’s to having a mathematical week.  Bon appetit!

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

First things first, I simply must mention a video that one of our readers sent us. Lily Ross was inspired by a recent post and created this amazing fake movie trailer!!! WOW! Thank you, Lily!

The video has been added to our Readers’ Gallery. Send us your creations and we’ll add them too.

Did you know that NASA is planning to send people to Mars around the year 2030? How far away would they be going? Click the picture to find out. It’s incredibly cool.

How far is it to Mars?

Mars

The Moon

distancetomars.com is an interactive website that answers the question, “how far is it to Mars?” It was created by a pair of designers, David Paliwoda and Jesse Williams. Think of how long that took to get there, and now realize that it takes light 3 times longer (since we were traveling impossibly fast, at 3 times the speed of light). That’s 3 light-minutes, so when we look at “the red planet,” we are seeing light that took more than 3 minutes to make the trip from Mars to our eye. We’re seeing what Mars looked like 3 minutes in the past!!! That’s pretty cool, I’d say.

Triangulation #9

Up next, another interactive website experience. This one is a series of interactive digital art — a sort of meditation on the essence of the triangle. Check out Triangulation.  Can you imagine adding a page to this? What would you design? Maybe you could use Scratch to actually make it!

Thanks to our friend, Malke Rosenfeld, for sending us this.

Before we get to our last item this week, a couple of important announcements. As in prior years, Plus Magazine is hosting a mathematical advent calendar. Each day, a new number becomes clickable, linking to a page about nifty math stuff.

The 2014 Plus Magazine Mathematical Advent Calendar

I also want to mention that The Aperiodical (an awesome (fairly advanced) math blog) is hosting a Math Pun Conmpetition!!! Here’s my submission, for those with a little bit of plane geometric knowledge:

Q: Why was it so hard for the equilateral quadrilateral to get home after school?

A: It got on the rhom BUS!

OK, now on to our last item of the week. Here it is…

A Pot-Pourri of People, Pictures, Places, Penrose Patterns, Polyhedra, Polyominoes, Posters, Posies, and Puzzles! (How about that?)

Alan Schoen with a model of a gyroid

I don’t know a whole lot about Alan Schoen, but his website has some pretty enticing images on it. Really, all I know about Schoen is that he discovered the Gyroid when he worked at NASA in 1970. He also created The Geometry Garret, a website full of cool stuff.

The thing that I want to share is something I’ve never seen before – LOMINOES. These are polyominoes, like the ones we’ve featured at least twice before, but they are simply in the shape of an L. Alan wrote a 10-page booklet on the subject as well as a much longer book. (147 pages!)

They’re both worth poking through. If an image grabs your fancy, start reading and see what you can learn.

Have a great week and bon appetit!