Tag Archives: sports

Lucea, Fiber Bundles, and Hamilton

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

The Summer Olympics are underway in Brazil. I have loved the Olympics since I was a kid. The opening ceremony is one of my favorite parts—the celebration of the host country’s history and culture, the athletes proudly marching in and representing their homeland. And the big moment when the Olympic cauldron is lit! This year I was just so delighted by the sculpture that acted as the cauldron’s backdrop.

Isn’t that amazing! The title of this enormous metal sculpture is Lucea, and it was created by American sculptor Anthony Howe. You can read about Anthony and how he came to make Lucea for the Olympics in this article. Here’s one quote from Anthony:

“I hope what people take away from the cauldron, the Opening Ceremonies, and the Rio Games themselves is that there are no limits to what a human being can accomplish.”

Here’s another view of Lucea from Anthony’s website:

Lucea is certainly hypnotizing in its own right, but I think it jumped out at me in part because I’ve been thinking a lot about fiber bundles recently. A fiber bundle is a “twist” on a simpler kind of object called a product space. You are familiar with some examples of products spaces. A square is a line “times” a line. A cylinder is a line “times” a circle. And a torus is a circle “times” a circle.

Square, cylinder, and torus.

So, what does it mean to introduce a “twist” to a product space? Well, it means that while every little patch of your object will look like a product, the whole thing gets glued up in some fancy way. So, instead of a cylinder that goes around all normal, we can let the line factor do a flip as it goes around the circle and voila—a Mobius strip!

Now, check out this image:

It’s two Mobius strips stuck together! Does this remind you of Lucea?! Instead of a line “times” a circle that’s been twisted, we have an X shape “times” a circle.

Do you think you could fill up all of space with an infinity of circles? You might try your hand at it. One answer to this puzzle is a wonderful example of a fiber bundle called the Hopf fibration. Just as you can think about a circle as a line plus one extra point to close it up, and a sphere as a plane with one extra point to close it up, the three-sphere is usual three-dimenional space plus one extra point. The Hopf fibration shows that the three-sphere is a twisted product of a sphere “times” a circle. For a really lovely visualization of this fact, check out this video:

That is some tough but also gorgeous mathematics. Since you’ve made it this far in the post, I definitely think you deserve to indulge and maybe rock out a little. And what’s the hottest ticket on Broadway this summer? I hope you’ll enjoy this superb music video about Hamilton!

William Rowan Hamilton, that is. The inventor of quaternions, explorer of Hamiltonian circuits, and reformulator of physics. Brilliant.

Here are a couple of pages of Hamiltonian circuit puzzles. The goal is to visit every dot exactly once as you draw one continuous path. Try them out! Rio, where the Olympics is happening, pops up as a dot in the first one. You might even try your hand at making some Hamiltonian puzzles of your own.

Happy puzzling, and bon appetit!

Posted by Justin Lanier. Categories: Math Munch. Tags: art, fiber bundle, fibration, history, Mobius strip, music, musical, olympics, puzzles, sculpture, sports, topology, video. 2 Comments

Apr. ’13

We Use Math, Integermania, and Best-of-Seven

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

“When will I use math?” Have you ever asked this question? Well, then you are in for a treat, because the good people of We Use Math have some answers for you! This site was created by the Math Department at Brigham Young University to help share information about career paths that are opened up by studying mathematics. Here’s their introductory video:

The We Use Math site shares write-ups about a wide range of career opportunities that involve doing mathematics. I was glad to learn more about less-familiar mathy careers like technical writing and cost estimation. Also, my brother has studied some operations management in college, so it was great to read the overview of that line of work. In addition, the We Use Math site has pages about recent math discoveries and about unsolved math problems. Check them out!

Next up is one of my long-time favorite websites: Integermania!

Perhaps you’ve heard of the four 4’s problem before. Using four 4’s and some arithmetic operations, can you make the numbers from 1 to 20? Or even higher? Some numbers are easy to make, like 16. It’s 4+4+4+4. Some are sneakier, like 1. One way it can be created is (4+4)/(4+4). But what about 7? Or 19? This is a very common type of problem in mathematics—which math objects of a certain type can be built with limited tools?

Steven J. Wilson

Integermania is a website where people from around the world have submitted number creations made of four small numbers and operations. It’s run by Steven J. Wilson, a math professor at Johnson County Community College in Kansas. (Steven has even more great math resources at his website Milefoot.com)

There are many challenges at Integermania: four 4’s, the first four prime numbers, the first four odds, and even the digits of Ramanujan’s famous taxicab number (1729).

Here are some number creations made of the first four prime numbers.
Can you make some of your own?

One of my favorite aspects of Integermania is the way it rates number creations by “exquisiteness level“. If a number creation is made using only simple operations—like addition or multiplication—then it’s regarded as more exquisite than if it uses operations like square roots or percentages. I also love how Integermania provides an opportunity for anyone to make their mark in the big world of mathematical research—it’s like scrawling a mathematical “I wuz here!” After years of visiting the site, I just submitted for the first time some number creations of my own. I’ll let you know how it goes, and I’d love to hear about it if you decide to submit, too.

Here are recaps of all the World Series since 1903 from MLB.com

Now coming to the plate: my final link of the week! Monday was the first day of the new Major League Baseball season. I want to share with you a New York Times article from last December. It’s called Keeping Score: Over in Four About a Fifth of the Time. The article digs into the outcomes of all of the World Series championships—not so much who won as how they won. It takes four victories to win a seven-game series, and there are 35 different ways that a best-of-seven series can play out, put in terms of wins and losses for the overall winner. For instance, a clean sweep would go WWWW, while another sequence would be WWLLWW. The article examines which of these win-loss sequences have been the most common in the World Series.

(Can you figure out why there are 35 possible win-loss sequences in a seven-game series? What about for a best-of-five series? And what if we tried to model the outcome of a series by assuming each team has a fixed chance of winning each game?)

A clip of the stats that are displayed in the Times article. Click through to see it all.

I was curious to know if the same results held true in other competitions. Are certain win-loss sequences rare across different sports? Are “sweeps” the most common outcome? After sifting through Wikipedia for a while, I was able to compile the statistics about win-loss sequences for hockey’s Stanley Cup Finals. This has been a best-of-seven series since 1939, and it has been played 73 times since then. (It didn’t happen in 2005 because of a lockout.) You can see the results of my research in this document. Two takeaways: sweeps are also the most common result in hockey, but baseball more frequently requires the full seven games to determine a winner.

It could be a fun project to look at other best-of-seven series, like the MLB’s League Championship Series or basketball’s NBA Finals. If you pull that data together, let us know in the comments!

Batter up, and bon appetit!

******

UPDATE (4/4/13): My first set of five number creations was accepted and are now posted on the Ramanujan challenge page. Here are the three small ones! Can you find a more exquisite way of writing 47 than I did?

Posted by Justin Lanier. Categories: Math Munch. Tags: arithmetic, baseball, careers, combinatorics, data, infographic, open problem, percentages, puzzles, recreational mathematics, sports, video. 9 Comments

Aug. ’12

Bridges, Meander Patterns, and Water Sports

This past week the Math Munch team got to attend the Bridges 2012. Bridges is a mathematical art conference, the largest one in the world. This year it was held at Towson University outside of Baltimore, Maryland. The idea of the conference is to build bridges between math and the arts.

Participants gave lectures about their artwork and the math that inspired or informed it. There were workshop sessions about mathematical poetry and chances to make baskets and bead bracelets involving intricate patterns. There was even a dance workshop about imagining negative-dimensional space! There were also some performances, including two music nights (which included a piece that explored a Fibonacci-like sequence called Narayana’s Cows) and a short film festival (here are last year’s films). Vi Hart and George Hart talked about the videos they make and world-premiered some new ones. And at the center of it all was an art exhibition with pieces from around the world.

The Zen of the Z-Pentomino by Margaret Kepner	Does this piece by Bernhard Rietzl remind you of a certain sweater?
5 Rhombic Screens by Alexandru Usineviciu	Pythagorean Proof by Donna Loraine

To see more, you should really just browse the Bridges online gallery.

A shot of the gallery exhibition

I know that Paul, Anna, and I will be sharing things with you that we picked up at Bridges for months to come. It was so much fun!

David Chappell

One person whose work and presentation I loved at Bridges is David Chappell. David is a professor of astronomy at the University of La Verne in California.

David shared some thinking and artwork that involve meander patterns. “Meander” means to wander around and is used to describe how rivers squiggle and flow across a landscape. David uses some simple and elegant math to create curve patterns.

Instead of saying where curves sit in the plane using x and y coordinates, David describes them using more natural coordinates, where the direction that the curve is headed in depends on how far along the curve you’ve gone. This relationship is encoded in what’s called a Whewell equation. For example, as you walk along a circle at a steady rate, the direction that you face changes at a contant rate, too. That means the Whewell equation of a circle might look like angle=distance. A smaller circle, where the turning happens faster, could be written down as angle=2(distance).

Look at how the Cauto River “meanders” across the Cuban landscape.

In his artwork, David explores curves whose equations are more complicated—ones that involve multiple sine functions. The interactions of the components of his equations allow for complex but rhythmic behavior. You can create meander patterns of your own by tinkering with an applet that David designed. You can find both the applet and more information about the math of meander patterns on David’s website.

David Chappell’s Meander #6
Make your own here!

When I asked David about how being a scientist affects his approach to making art, and vice versa, he said:

My research focuses on nonlinear dynamics and pattern formation in fluid systems. That is, I study the spatial patterns that arise when fluids are agitated (i.e. shaken or stirred). I think I was attracted to this area because of my interest in the visual arts. I’ve always been interested in patterns. The science allows me to study the underlying physical systems that generate the patterns, and the art allows me to think about how and why we respond to different patterns the way we do. Is there a connection between how we respond to a visual image and the underlying “rules” that produced the image? Why to some patterns look interesting, but others not so much?

For more of my Q&A with David, click here. In addition, David will be answering questions in the comments below, so ask away!

Since bridges and meandering rivers are both water-related, I thought I’d round out this post with a couple of interesting links about water sports and the Olympics. My springboard was a site called Maths and Sport: Countdown to the Games.

Arrangements of rowers that are “wiggle-less”

Here’s an article that explores different arrangements of rowers in a boat, focusing on finding ones where the boat doesn’t “wiggle” as the rowers row. It’s called Rowing has its Moments.

Next, here’s an article about the swimming arena at the 2008 Beijing games, titled Swimming in Mathematics.

Paul used to be a competitive diver, and he says there’s an interesting code for the way dives are numbered. For example, the “Forward 1 ½ Somersaults in Tuck Position” is dive number 103C. How does that work? You can read all about it here. (Degree of difficulty is explained as well.)

Finally, enjoy these geometric patterns inspired by synchronized swimming!

Stay cool, and bon appetit!

Posted by Justin Lanier. Categories: Math Munch. Tags: algebra, applet, art, graphs, music, poetry, polyominoes, sports, tessellation, Vi Hart, video. 9 Comments