Category Archives: mathematics

did you bring enough to share?

In the old Bill Cosby Show, Chet Kincaid was a PE teacher who, in one memorable episode, substituted for an algebra teacher. (Come to think of it, that episode was probably my first exposure to algebra!) Does anyone remember the … Continue reading

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the urge to meddle

I recently began contributing to Wikipedia; my biggest contribution so far is these tables of convex uniform polychora (the data are borrowed, the arrangement mine). After a few days of this, wherever I see a webpage with awkward language I … Continue reading

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fifty-two choose five

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

how to impress chicks?

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One Of These Things

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

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

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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