Category Archives: mathematics

beauty’s where you find it

I mis-heard some trivial question as “What is Hamming music?” For some of us, the name Hamming is strongly associated with information theory, and so I imagined that “Hamming music” must be algorithmic composition using error-correcting principles. And that got … Continue reading

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finite menu

One episode of Murder in Suburbia involves a mate-swapping club of four couples. (In this case, sex provides the opportunity but not the motive.) It occurred to me in my insomnia that, instead of drawing names from a hat, for … Continue reading

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m4th3m4t1c5 R k3wL

Netflix (or should I say N3tfl1×) got the first season of Numb3rs this week, and I watched the first four episodes with mixed reactions. On one hand, any popular presentation of mathematics in the real world is a treat. But … Continue reading

Posted in cinema, mathematics | 2 Comments

the axes of confusion

When economists draw supply-demand charts, they put the independent variable (price) on the vertical axis and the dependent variable (quantity) on the horizontal, contrary to the usual practice in physics and pure mathematics. It’s surprisingly hard for me to adjust … Continue reading

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things that go round

weird orbits (cited by John Baez) rotating infrared Titan

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when grown-ups play with blocks

I’ve redone the Wikipedia page on convex uniform tilings of Euclidean 3-space. It occurs to me that one could enumerate the convex uniform tilings of flat, spherical and hyperbolic 3-spaces by an approach similar to what I’ve used to find … Continue reading

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how’s your German?

I’d love to have an English translation of the German comments in fullgen.c, a program that counts the polyhedra that can be made of pentagons and hexagons (i.e. fullerenes), so that I can modify it. (None of the output modes … Continue reading

Posted in language, mathematics, neep-neep | 3 Comments