Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!
What will you do with your math notebook at the end of the school year? Keep it as a reference for the future? Save it as a keepsake? Toss it out? Turn it into confetti? Find your favorite math bits and doodles and make a collage?
Lucky for us, our first president kept his math notebooks from when he was a young teenager. And though it’s passed through many hands over the years—including those of Chief Justice John Marshall and the State Department—it has survived to this day. That’s right. You can check out math problems and definitions copied out by George Washington over 250 years ago. They’re all available online at the Library of Congress website.
Or at least most of them. They seem to be out of order, with a few pages missing!
That’s what mathematician and math history detective Fred Rickey has figured out. Fred has long been a fan of math history. Since he retired from the US Military Academy in 2011, Fred has been able to pursue his historical interests more actively. Fred is currently studying the Washington cypher books to help prepare a biography about Washington’s boyhood years. You can see two papers that Fred has co-authored about Washington’s mathematics here.
Fred writes:
Washington valued his cyphering books and kept them as a ready source of reference for the rest of his life. This would seem to be particularly true of his surveying studies.
Surveying played a big role in Washington’s career, and math is important for today’s surveyors, too.
Do you have a question for Fred about the math that George Washington learned? Send it to us and we’ll try to include it in our upcoming Q&A with Fred!
A tessellation, by me!
Next up, check out this Tessellation Kit. It was made by Nico Disseldorp, who also made the geometry construction game we featured recently. The kit is a lot of fun to play with!
One thing I like about this Tessellation Kit is how it’s discrete—it deals with large chunks of the screen at a time. This restriction make me want to explore, because it give me the feeling that there are only so many possible combinations.
I’m also curious about the URL for this applet—the web address for it. Notice how it changes whenever you make a change in your tessellation? What happens when you change some of those letters and numbers—like bababaaaa to bababcccc? Interesting…
For another fun applet, check out this doodling ant:
Langton’s Ant.
Langton’s Ant is following a simple set of rules. In a white square? Turn right. In a black square? Turn left. And switch the color of the square that you leave. This ant is an example of a cellular automaton, and we’ve seen several of these here on Math Munch before. This one is different from others because it changes just one square at a time, and not the whole screen at once.
Breaking out of chaos.
There’s a lot that is unknown about Langton’s ant, and it has some mysterious behavior. For example, after thousands of steps of seeming randomness, the ant goes into a steady pattern, paving a highway out to infinity. What gives? Well, you can try out some patterns of your own in the applets on the Serendip website. (previously). And you can read some amusing tales—ant-ecdotes?—about Langton’s ant in this lovely article.
I learned about Langton’s Ant from Richard Evan Schwartz in our new Q&A. In the interview, Rich shares his thoughts about computers, art, what to pursue in life, and of course: Really Big Numbers.
Check it out, and bon appetit!
Math Munch 