Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

The most epic Pi Day of the century will happen in just a few weeks: 3/14/15! I hope you’re getting ready. To help you get into the spirit, check out these quilts.

American Pi.

African American Pi.

There’s an old joke that “pi is round, not square”—a punchline to the formula for the area of a circle. But in these quilts, we can see that pi really can be square! Each quilt shows the digits of pi in base 3. The quilts are a part of a project called SquareRoots by artist and mathematician John Sims.

There’s lots more to explore and enjoy on John’s website, including a musical interpretation of pi and some fractal trees that he has designed. John studied mathematics as an undergrad at Antioch College and has pursued graduate work at Wesleyan University. He even created a visual math course for artists when he taught at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida.

I enjoyed reading several articles (1, 2, 3, 4) about John and his quilts, as well as this interview with John. Here’s one of my favorite quotes from it, in response to “How do you begin a project?”

It can happen in two ways. I usually start with an object, which motivates an idea. That idea connects to other objects and so on, and, at some point, there is a convergence where idea meets form. Or sometimes I am fascinated by an object. Then I will seek to abstract the object into different spatial dimensions.

You can find more of John’s work on his YouTube channel. Check out this video, which features some of John’s music and an art exhibit he curated called Rhythm of Structure.

Next up: Some of our US states are nice and boxy—like Colorado. (Or is it?) Other states have very complicated, very dent-y shapes—way more complicated than the shapes we’re used to seeing in math class.

Which state is the most dent-y? How would you decide?

The mathematical term for dent-y is “concave”. One way you might try to measure the concavity of a state is to see how far outside of the state you can get by moving in a straight line from one point in it to another. For example, you can drive straight from one place in West Virginia to another, and along the way pass through four other states. That’s pretty crazy.

But is it craziest? Is another state even more concave? That’s what this study set out to investigate. Click through to find out their results. And remember that this is just one way to measure how concave a state is. A different way of measuring might give a different answer.

This puzzle about the concavity of states is silly and fun, but there’s more here, too. Thinking about the denty-ness of geographic regions is very important to our democracy. After all, someone has to decide where to draw the lines. When regions and districts are carved out in a way that’s unfair to the voters and their interests, that’s called gerrymandering.

To find out more about the process of creating congressional districts, you can listen to a talk by Karen Saxe, a math professor at Macalester College. Karen was a part of a committee that worked to draw new congressional districts in Minnesota after the 2010 US Census. (Karen speaks about compactness measures starting here.)

Recently I ran across an announcement for a conference—a conference that was all about the math of sea ice! I never grow tired of learning new and exciting ways that math connects with the world. Check out this video featuring Kenneth Golden, a leading mathematician in the study of sea ice who works at the University of Utah. I love the line from the video: “People don’t usually think about mathematics as a daring occupation.” Ken and his team show that math can take you anywhere that you can imagine.

Bon appetit!

Reflection sheet – SquareRoots, Concave States, and Sea Ice