Tag Archives: fractals

04

Jun. ’12

The Fractal Foundation, Schoolhouse Rock, and More

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Triangle Cutout Fractal

Up first, check out the Fractal Foundation.  They’re mission is simple: “We use the beauty of fractals to inspire interest in Science, Math and Art.”  If you played around with recursive drawing a few weeks ago, then perhaps you were as inspired by fractals as they hope you’ll be.  If you’re not really sure what fractals actually are, here’s a great one-page explanation from the Fractal Foundation website.  They also have an excellent page of “fractivities,” including instructions for the beautiful paper cutout fractal pictured on the right.  If you want to have your mind blow, check out their fantastic page of fractal videos.  Just amazing.



Next up, have you ever heard of Schoolhouse Rock?  It’s a series of rocking animated music videos that originally ran on TV from 1973 to 1985.  Vintage math goodness!  They cover all kinds of educational stuff like grammar and history, but I totally love the math videos, and a few of them are on YouTube!  Down below you can watch two of my favorites, and you can find the others here.  if you poke around YouTube, you could probably find a few more as well.




Finally, a few additions to our resource pages.  For the Math Games page, we’re adding Linebounder.  You and the computer battle to draw a line towards your goal.  I had a really hard time with this at first, but there are certain strategies that the computer simply cannot beat.  You just have to find them.  Also new is Shift, another fun game that plays with the relationship between figure and ground.  For the new Math Art Tools page, we’re adding Tessellate!  It’s an interactive applet that lets you make custom tiles to cover the plane.  Here’s a few examples I just made.


Bon appetit!

Hexagonal

Triangular

Rectangular
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29

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.

puzzle

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!

by Anna Weltman

by Anna Weltman

Stars of the Mind’s Sky
by Paul Salomon

Star Ring 24
by Paul Salomon

300 Stars in Orbit
by Paul Salomon

by Justin Lanier

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20

May. ’12

Line Fractals, Knitting, and 3-D Design

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Take a look at this beautiful line drawing:

Jason Padgett

This is called, “Towards Pi 3.141552779 Hand-Drawn,” and it’s by mathematician and artist Jason Padgett.  Jason wasn’t always a mathematician or an artist.  In fact, it was only after a severe head injury that Jason suddenly found that he “saw” fractals and other geometric images in mathematical and scientific ideas.  Jason is interested in limits.  The picture above, for example, is Jason’s artistic interpretation of a limit that approaches pi.  If you draw a circle with radius 1 and make polygons inside of it using secants for their sides, the areas of the polygons get closer and closer to pi as the number of sides increases – but always stay less than pi.  If you take that same circle and make polygons around it using tangents for their sides, the areas of the polygons also get closer and closer to pi as the number of sides increases – but always stay larger than pi.  Jason tried to draw the way that those sequences “trap pi” in this picture.

I think it’s really amazing that Jason draws these by hand.  Here’s some more of Jason’s artwork, and a video of Jason drawing “Towards Pi 3.141552779 Hand-Drawn.”

Space Time Sine Cosine and Tangent Waves

The Power of Pi

Wave Particle Duality
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHqRTtnU8Wg&feature=fvwrel]

Next, did you like Sondra Eklund’s sweater from last week?  Did it inspire you to do some mathematical knitting of your own?  If so, check out the website Woolly Thoughts.

Woolly Thoughts is run by “mathekniticians” Pat Ashforth and Steve Plummer who love to do, teach, and share math with others through their knitting.  They’ve designed many beautiful and mathematical afghan and pillow patterns, and some patterns for interesting math toys.  Here are some of my favorites:

The “Finite Field” afghan is a color-coded addition table using binary.

The “Fibo-Optic” afghan is made to look like a flying cube using side-lengths based on the Fibonacci sequence.

Finally, one of the programs featured in the new Math Art Tools link is TinkerCAD.  TinkerCAD is a program you can use to make 3D designs – just because, or to print out with a 3D printer!

TinkerCAD has three parts: Discover, Learn, and Design.  In the Discover section, you can browse things that other tinkerers have made and download them to print yourself.  There are some really cool things out there, like this Father’s Day mug made by Fabricatis and this sail boat made by Klyver Boys.

Next, in the Learn section, you can play different “quests” to hone your TinkerCAD skills.  Finally, in the Design section, you can make your own thing!  TinkerCAD is really intuitive to use.  The TinkerCAD tutorial video is really helpful if you want to learn how to use TinkerCAD – as are the quests.

Stay tuned for pictures of some TinkerCAD things made by friends of Math Munch!

Bon appetit!

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