Category Archives: mathematics

wiggly lines

Posted on Friday, 2010 August 13 by Anton

A few people will recognize immediately how and why I did this.

Posted in heraldry, mathematics | 3 Comments

if MCE were alive

Posted on Friday, 2010 January 29 by Anton

My strip representation of the hyperbolic plane inspired Vladimir Bulatov to explore weirder conformal mappings thereof. (Conformal means angles are preserved.)

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | 1 Comment

in memory

Posted on Tuesday, 2009 December 29 by Anton

Dan Alderson once made a map of nearby stars by mounting little colored spheres on threads strung between holes in two sheets of heavy clear plastic. It occurs to me that, taking the stars in pairs, he could use half … Continue reading →

Posted in astronomy, fandom, mathematics | Leave a comment

polytopes

Posted on Sunday, 2009 June 07 by Anton

Dr. Richard Klitzing lost his webhost, so I took custody of his polytope pages.

Posted in mathematics | Leave a comment

circles in ellipses

Posted on Thursday, 2009 January 08 by Anton

Many people have worked on the problem of packing equal circles efficiently in various regular shapes. David Cantrell asks, what is the ellipse of least area that can enclose n unit circles? Sometimes it’s a circle (n=1,7,19), sometimes it’s highly … Continue reading →

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Hilbert’s palette

Posted on Wednesday, 2008 December 03 by Anton

A space-filling path through this square is matched to an analogous path through the color-cube. I had this idea in mind for years but the algorithm for Hilbert’s curve defeated me; then I stumbled on Steve Witham’s Python code, and … Continue reading →

Posted in eye-candy, mathematics | 4 Comments

Takana go goth

Posted on Sunday, 2008 October 12 by Anton

See Takana. The 306 figures shown there can be reduced to 45 by rotation and reflection. I fitted a polynomial curve to each partial path, and superimposed them.

Posted in curve-fitting | 2 Comments