Over on YouTube you can see [Yang-Hui He] present to The Royal Institution about Mathematics: The rise of the machines. In this one hour presentation [Yang-Hui He] explains how AI is driving progress in pure mathematics. He says that right now AI is poised to change the very nature of how mathematics is done. He […]
In 1966, a mathematician named [Leo Moser] proposed what sounds like a simple problem: What’s the largest shape you can move through a 1-meter corridor with a right-angle corner? Now, Korean mathematics whiz [Baek Jin-eon] claims to have solved the problem, nearly 60 years later. The trick is, apparently, the shape of the sofa. By […]
Can a shape pass through itself? That is to say, if one had two identical solids, would it be possible to orient one such that a hole could be cut through it, allowing the other to pass through without breaking the first into separate pieces? It turns out that the answer is yes, at least […]
While William Rowan Hamilton isn’t a household name like, say, Einstein or Hawking, he might have been. It turns out the Irish mathematician almost stumbled on quantum theory in the or around 1827. [Robyn Arianrhod] has the story in a post on The Conversation. Famously, Newton worked out the rules for the motion of ordinary […]
“Emergency Law Enforcement Officer Hologram program activated. Please state the nature of your criminal or civil emergency.” Taking a cue from Star Trek: Voyager, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency is testing a holographic police officer, with surprisingly — dare we say, suspiciously? — positive results. The virtual officer makes an appearance every two minutes in […]
Humanity pretty much has Pi figured out at this point. We’ve calculated it many times over and are confident about what it is down to many, many decimal places. However, if you fancy estimating it with some electronic assistance, you might find this project from [Roni Bandini] interesting. [Roni] programmed an Arduino Nano R4 to […]
Pi Day is here! We bet that you know that famous constant to a few decimal points, and you could probably explain what it really means: the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. But what about the constant e? Sure, you might know it is a transcendental number around 2.72 or so. You […]
How hard can it be to write a simple four-function calculator program? After all, computers are good at math, and making a calculator isn’t exactly blazing a new trail, right? But [Chad Nauseam] will tell you that it is harder than you probably think. His post starts with a screenshot of the iOS calculator app […]
We always enjoy videos from the [Mathologer], but we especially liked the recent video on the Helicone, a toy with a surprising connection to mathematics. The toy is cool all by itself, but the video shows how a sufficiently large heliocone models many “natural numbers” and acts, as [Mathologer] puts it, acts as “microscope to […]
Proof without words of the two-color case of Ramsey’s theorem. (Credit: CMG Lee, Wikimedia) Generally when assuming a chaotic (i.e. random) system like an undirected graph, we assume that if we start coloring these (i.e. assign values) with two colors no real pattern emerges. Yet it’s been proven that if you have a graph with […]