Carnival of Mathematics #62

What is the Carnival of Mathematics? Math bloggers submit articles they have written recently and each month a host writes a post linking to the submitted posts. The sister carnival, Math Teachers at Play, focuses on math education and on math up through high school level. For a more thorough description of the two carnivals and some FAQs, please see Mike Croucher’s article What is a Maths Carnival?

I’m taking a turn hosting this month. Tradition dictates that the host begin with some trivia about the number of the post. As this is the 62nd Carnival of Mathematics, here are a few facts about 62.

  • 62 is the only number whose cube (238328) consists of 3 digits each occurring 2 times.
  • The great rhombicosidodecahedron has 62 sides.
  • Louis Pasteur developed the first rabies vaccination at age 62.

And now onto the posts.

Math and science teacher Cory Poole sends in a video that he created along with his partners and students. The video features a 64-foot Sierpenski triangle about of 12,000 tortilla chips. Read more about the story of the video. Also, here are the bloopers from making the video.

St. Swithun’s day is a sort of British analog of America’s Groundhog Day. If it rains on St. Swithun’s day, it is supposed to rain for the next 40 days. Is there some truth to the legend? See Jon McLoone‘s article Mathematica Tests the St. Swithun’s Day Proverb posted at Wolfram Blog.

Edmund Harriss from Maxwell’s Demon presents Spirographs and the third dimension. Interesting visually and mathematically.

toral spirograph

Rachel Thomas presents Beautiful symmetry provides glimpse into quantum world (link died). This article reports on a low-termperature experiment that implies that the exceptional Lie group E8 is at work.

Did you know that sine and cosine are equal for all x? Heather (Xi) submitted a pseudo-proof in A=B implies that 1=1, therefore? by her colleague TwoPi at 360. (If there is ever a 360th Carnival of Mathematics, Heather should host it.)

Update: The 360 blog has agreed to host the 360th Carnival of Mathematics, tentatively scheduled for December 1, 2034. (Mike, I hope it’s OK that I scheduled this date without consulting you. ;))

Marc West presents The curse of the duck, a post about mathematics and cricket. His blog is Mr Science Show: Where Science Meets Pop Culture.

Dan M presents Appolonian Gaskets and Ford Circles on his blog mathrecreation. This post relates number theory and geometry as Ford circles are related to the Farey sequence.

Ford circles

Rick Regan presents Counting Binary and Hexadecimal Palindromes posted at Exploring Binary. Rick counts base 10 palindromes as a warm-up before diving into new territory with binary and hexadecimal numbers.

Gregory Astley wrote a guest post Maxima Tutorial – plotting direction fields for 1st order ODEs for Mike Croucher‘s blog Walking Randomly. (Maxima is part of the SAGE mathematics system. Mike has written several posts about SAGE lately.)

Annarita Ruberto from Matem@ticaMente presents the article “How heavy the fish?” The original post was written in Italian, and here is Google’s translation of the page into English.

Matt McDonnell presents Mathematical Recreations: Tweetable Game Of Life, a guest blog for Loren Shure‘s blog Loren on the Art of MATLAB.

For some mental arithmetic shortcuts and an explanation of why they work, see Sol Lederman‘s post Trachtenberg speed multiplication: exploring why it works on his blog Wild About Math.

Politics impacts sphere of human activity, including math education. See Jason Dyer‘s post Anatomy of a Political Math-Ed Reaction on The Number Warrior.

Peter Rowlett from Travels in a Mathematical World presents Substitution ciphers: Ancient – Renaissance, video included below.

You can keep up with Carnival of Mathematics news on Twitter by following @CarnivalOfMath. You may also be interested in daily math facts on Twitter from @ProbFact (probability), @AnalysisFact (real and complex analysis), and @AlgebraFact (algebra and number theory).

6 thoughts on “Carnival of Mathematics #62

  1. Thanks for hosting the Carnival this month! I’m looking forward to reading these while I ought to be grading.

    One clarification — I didn’t actually write the post about A=B: that was written by TwoPi. And yes, we’ll totally host the 360th Carnival on December 1, 2034!

  2. Hello, John! Thanks for hosting “How heavy the fish?”.

    Congratulations to the contributors and to you for the post!

    Have a nice day.

    See you soon.
    Annarita:)

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