Category Archives: mathematics

fifty-two choose five

Posted on Thursday, 2005 December 22 by Anton

So I was writing a little allegorical paragraph which invited the reader to imagine a poker game in which a dispute arises over whether a flush beats a straight or not. “(The one holding the straight,” I explained, “is a … Continue reading →

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Brent gets desperate

Posted on Thursday, 2005 October 20 by Anton

how to impress chicks?

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One Of These Things

Posted on Thursday, 2005 July 14 by Anton

I’m looking at a banner ad that says Q. Which is not like the others? 63 57 98 01 I saw quickly that none are prime (1 is usually not counted as prime, so that each integer’s prime factorization is … Continue reading →

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time-sink of the week

Posted on Tuesday, 2005 July 12 by Anton

Planarity, a Flash puzzle: rearrange the vertices so that no edges cross. (Cited by Joshua Burton.) When a solution is near, the program gets very slow, which seems backward. (Thursday: It has been changed to test only on the player’s … Continue reading →

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fun with topology

Posted on Friday, 2005 June 17 by Anton

It’s surprising that I had not heard before of the mathematical sculptor Rinus Roelofs. His Möbius-double could be seen as a metaphor for half-spin particles.

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fun with refraction

Posted on Friday, 2005 April 22 by Anton
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the stubborn spiral

Posted on Saturday, 2005 February 19 by Anton

Rusin’s disco ball golden angles Saff & Kuijlaars Examples of three algorithms for distributing nodes fairly evenly over a sphere. Those on the middle and right slice the sphere into parallel bands of equal area (much narrower than the white … Continue reading →

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