Category Archives: mathematics

symmetries made simple

This may be of interest to only a few: Simplest Canonical Polyhedra of Each Symmetry Type (rotable in Java); in other words, canonical forms of the simplest topologies that allow the specified symmetries and none higher. Any convex polyhedron can … Continue reading

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negative curves

For years I’ve wished to learn enough hyperbolic geometry to write a simple ray-tracer. Recently a post on comp.graphics.algorithms advised me to look up Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometry by Patrick J. Ryan; I was pleased to find that its subtitle … Continue reading

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non c’è più religione

Tsk. A current radio spot gives the web address “wachovia dot com backslash new”. Meanwhile, what’s new with me? I’m reading Coxeter’s Non-Euclidean Geometry in the hope that it will give me the stuff I’ve sought in vain in other … Continue reading

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just don’t throw it indoors

Vladimir Bulatov makes and sells pretty things in metal, wood and stained glass. I haven’t bought any of them — yet!

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C(52,5)

Played poker last night – for the second time in my life, if I haven’t miscounted – with some Stanfordites; I think I was the only one there over thirty. Won $2.50.

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16 million colors

Nearly eight hours in the making, here it is: all the 24-bit colors in a tasteful, tilable fractal arrangement — 16million.png.gz (1 megabyte). And since Mads asked for it, the Python sourcecode: two files. Another way to flatten the color … Continue reading

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Takana

I had the idea to design a fantasy script from combinations of a small repertoire of features: namely, subsets of this set of twelve segments. Using a fixed number of segments gives some built-in error-detection. There are 924 subsets of … Continue reading

Posted in language, mathematics | 8 Comments