Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Whoa. What is that?

Is that even possible?

This gear sphere and many others are the creations of Paul Nylander. There are 92 gears in this gear sphere. Can you figure out how many there are of each color? Do you notice any familiar shapes in the gears’ layout?

What’s especially neat are the sizes of the gears—how many teeth each gear color has. You can see the ratios in the upper left corner. Paul describes some of the steps he took to find gears sizes that would work together. He wrote a computer program to do some searching. Then he did some precise calculating and some trial and error. And finally he made some choices about which possibilities he liked best. Sounds like doing math to me!

Along the way Paul figured out that the blue gears must have a number of teeth that is a multiple of five, while the yellow ones must have a multiple of three. I think that makes sense, looking at the number of red gears around each one. So much swirly symmetry!

Spiral shadows!

Be sure to check out some of Paul’s other math art while you’re on his site. Plus, you can read about a related gear sphere in this post by mathematician John Baez.

I figured there had to be a good math game that involves gears. I didn’t find quite what I expected, but I did find something I like. It’s a game that’s called—surprise, surprise—Gears! It isn’t an online game, but it’s easy to download.

Can you find the moves to make all the gears point downwards?

Wuzzit Trouble!

And if you’re in the mood for some more gear gaming and you have access to a tablet or smartphone, you should check out Wuzzit Trouble. It’s another free download game, brought to you by “The Math Guy” Keith Devlin. Keith discusses the math ideas behind Wuzzit Trouble in this article on his blog and in this video.

Last up this week, I’d like to share with you some souvenirs. If you went on a math vacation or a math tour, where would you go? One of the great things about math is that you can do it anywhere at all. Still, there are some mathy places in the world that would be especially neat to visit. And I don’t mean a place like the Hilbert Hotel (previously)—although you can get a t-shirt or coffee mug from there if you’d like! The mathematician David Hilbert actually spent much of his career in Göttingen, a town and university in Germany. It’s a place I’d love to visit one day. Carl Gauss lived in Göttingen, and so did Felix Klein and Emmy Noether—and lots more, too. A real math destination!

Lots of math has been inspired by or associated with particular places around the world. Just check out this fascinating list on Wikipedia.

The Arctic Circle Theorem

The Warsaw Circle

The Cairo Pentagonal Tiling

Did you know that our word souvenir comes from the French word for “memory”? One thing that I like about math is that I don’t have to memorize very much—I can just work things out! But every once in a while, there is something totally arbitrary that I just have to remember. Here’s one memory-helper that has stuck with me for a long time.

May you, like our alligator friend, find some good math to munch on. Bon appetit!