Tag Archives: infographic

23

Sep. ’12

Stand-Up, Relatively Prime, and Aliens?

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

As you may have noticed, we here at Math Munch are all about good math videos.  Well, with Matt Parker’s math stand-up comedy YouTube channel, we feel like we’ve hit the jackpot!

Yes, you read it right – Matt is a math stand-up comedian.  Matt does stand-up comedy routines about mathematics at schools and math conferences in the United Kingdom.  In fact, he and several other mathematicians and teachers have started an organization called Think Maths that sends funny and entertaining mathematicians to schools to get kids more excited about math.  He also does podcasts  and is writing a book!  Cool!

Here are two of my favorite videos from Matt’s channel.  The first is a problem involving a sleeping princess and a sneaky prince.  I haven’t solved the problem yet – so, if you do, don’t give away the answer!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv0Onj3wXCE&feature=plcp]

In the second, Matt shows you how to look like you know how to solve a Rubik’s cube and impress your friends.  And it teaches you some interesting facts about Rubik’s cubes at the same time.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPD_OkjnCqU&feature=plcp]

We’ve dug deep into the world of cool, mathy videos – but how about cool, mathy radio?  Personally, I love radio.  And I love math – so what could be better than a radio podcast about math?

Check out this new series of podcasts about mathematics by Samuel Hansen.  It’s called Relatively Prime.  The first episode has just been released!  It’s about the fascinating (and a little scary) topic of the three mathematical tools that you’ll need to survive, in Samuel’s words, “the coming apocalypse.”  And what are these tools?  Game theory, the mathematics of risk, and geometric reasoning.  How will these mathematical ideas help you?  Well, listen to the podcast and find out!  The podcast features interviews with many mathematicians, including Edmund Harris (who we wrote about in April) and Matt Parker.

I especially like this podcast because it gives some good answers to the question, “What can mathematics be used for?”  Even though I love doing math just for fun, I sometimes wonder how math can be used in other subjects and problems I might face in my life outside of math.  If you wonder this sometimes, too, you might like listening to this podcast.

We had the opportunity to interview Samuel about mathematics and the making of Relatively Prime.  Check out the interview on the Q&A page.

Finally, talking about the apocalypse (and the uses of math) makes me think about alien encounters.  What are the chances that there’s an intelligent alien civilization out there?  There are a lot of factors that go into answering this question – such as, what are the chances that a planet will develop life?  The evaluation of these chances is largely a matter of science, as is actually contacting aliens.  But math can be used to come up with a formula that tells us how likely it is that we’ll encounter aliens, given the other chances and how they relate to each other.

The equation that models this is called the Drake Equation.  It was developed in 1961 by a scientist named Dr. Frank Drake and has been used by scientists ever since to calculate the chances that there are intelligent aliens for us to talk to.  The equation is particularly interesting because small changes in, say, the number of stars that have planets, can drastically change the chance that we’ll encounter aliens.

Want to play with this equation?  Check out this awesome infographic about the Drake Equation from the BBC.  You can decide for yourself the chances that a planet will develop life and the number of years we’ll be sending messages to aliens or use numbers that scientists think might be accurate.

Bon appetit!  And watch out for aliens.  If my calculations are correct, there are a lot of them out there.

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16

Apr. ’12

Squiggles, Spheres, and Taxes

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Check out this cool doodle animation from the blog of Matt Henderson. Matt studied math at Cambridge as an undergrad and now does research on speech and language technology. His idea for a doodle was to start with an equilateral triangle and then encircle it with squiggles until it eventually turned into a square.

Matt Henderson

Matt Henderson

Matt’s triangle-to-square squiggle

Matt has all kinds of beautiful and intricate mathematical images on his blog, many of them animated using computer code. He made a similar squiggle-doodle that evolves a straight line into a profile of his face; an animation of rolling a ball on a merry-go-round; a million dot generator; and many more!

Along the same “lines” as Matt’s squiggle, Ted Theodosopoulos wrote an article in Peer Points reviewing a research paper by Stanford mathematician Ravi Vakil. The title of Ravi’s paper is “The Mathematics of Doodling.”

Ravi’s doodle

Next up, check out this cool visualization of a sphere.

The title of the video is Spherikal and was created by Ion Lucin, a graphic artist in Spain.

Something neat comes out about Ion’s attitude toward learning and sharing in a comment he makes:

“Thanks for appreciating my work. I was thinking the same, not to reveal my secrets, but then, i to learned from the videos and tutorials of others, i have been working with 3D for a year and a half, and all i know about it i learned it by myself, by seeing tutorials, im from fine arts. In a way a feel i must share , like other did and helped me”

What a great attitude!

Another spherical idea comes from a post on one of my favorite websites: MathOverflow, a question-and-answer site for research-level mathematicians…and anyone else! The question I have in mind was posted by Joe O’Rourke, a mathematician at Smith College and one of my favorite posters on MathOverflow. It’s about a certain kind of random walk on a sphere. Check it out!

For this step distance, it looks like a random walk will fill up the whole sphere. What about other step distances?

Again, such a cool picture is created by translating a mathematical scenario into some computer code!

Since this week is when federal income taxes are due, I’ll leave you with a few links about taxes and the federal budget. First, here’s the IRS’s website for kids. (Yes, for real.)

Next, this infographic lets you examine how President Obama’s 2011 budget proposal divvied up funds to all of the different departments and projects of the federal government. Can you find NASA’s budget?

2011budget

On a more personal scale, this applet called “Where did my tax dollars go?” does just that—when you give it a yearly personal income, it will calculate how much of it will go toward different ends.

Finally, this applet lets you tinker with the existing tax brackets and see the effect on total revenue generated for the federal government. Can you find a flat tax rate that would keep total tax revenue the same?

Whew! That was a lot; I hope you didn’t find it too taxing. Bon appetit!

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27

Nov. ’11

Number Gossip, Travels, and Topology

Thanksgiving was great, but I hope you saved room for this week’s Math Munch!

First up, meet Tanya Khovonova, a mathematician and blogger who works at MIT.  Number Gossip is a website of hers where you can find the mysterious facts behind your favorite numbers.  For instance, did you know that the opposite sides of a die add to 7, or that 7 is the only prime number followed by a cube (8=23)? Speaking of 7, I also found this cool test for divisibility by 7 on Tanya’s website.

Tanya Khovonova

Is that divisible by 7? Let's take a walk.

Read about how to use it here, but basically you follow that diagram a certain way, and if you land back at the white dot, then you’re number is divisible by 7. I’m amazed and trying to figure out how it works!

Infographic - Holiday Travel Patterns

Next up, I wanted to share this incredible picture I found today.  It’s an infographic showing travel patterns in the US during the holiday season.  The picture must represent millions of little pieces of data, so I’ve spent a lot of time staring and analyzing it.  Did you notice the bumps in the bottom?  Why is that happening?  Why are the blue lines different from the white lines? There are so many good things to be seen.

Finally, take a look at these pictures!  They’re from Kenneth Baker’s Sketches of Topology blog.  Kenneth makes images demonstrating ideas in topology, one of the most visually appealing branches of mathematics.  Some of it is tough to understand, but the pictures certainly are fascinating.

On a related point, have you taken a look at the Math Munch page of math games? (You can always find the link at the top of the column to the right.)  I just added a topology game, the Four Color Game, and I’m kind of loving it.  It’s based on a famous math result about only needing 4 colors to nicely color any flat map.  This is called the Four Color Theorem, and it’s a part of topology.

Bon appetit!

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