Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

One of my favorite math sites on the internet is mathpuzzle. It’s written and curated by recreational mathematician Ed Pegg Jr. About once a month, Ed makes a post that shares a ton of awesome math—interesting tilings, tricky puzzles, results about polyhedra and polyominos, and so much more. Below are some of my favorite finds at mathpuzzles. Go to the site to discover much more to explore!

Shapes that three kinds of polyominoes can tile.

Erich Friedman’s 2012 holiday puzzles

A slideable, flexible hypercube you can hold in your hands! Video below.

Next, have you ever wanted to be a movie star? How about a math movie star? Then there are two math video contests that you should know about. The first is for middle schoolers— the Reel Math Challenge. It’s run by MATHCOUNTS, which has for many years run a middle school problem solving contest. (I competed in it when I was in middle school.) This is only the second year for the Reel Math Challenge, but lots of videos have already been created. You can check them out here.

The second contest is for high schoolers and is called Math-O-Vision. The challenge is to make a video that shows “the way Math fills our world.” Math-O-Vision is sponsored by the Dartmouth College Math Department and the Neukom Institute.

Finally, here’s a fun little applet I found called Make-a-Flake. You can use it to make intricate digital snowflake designs.

Two snowflakes from the Make-a-Flake gallery.

Of course, it’s a lot of fun to make non-virtual snowflakes as well—find a pair of scissor and some paper and go for it! For basic instructions, head over to snowflakes.info. And for some inspiration, check out this Flickr group!

Bon appetit!