Leveraging cartoons, or, if only I had a place to stand.

I keep losing, and then finding again, this great set of cartoon puzzles.  They use the principle of the lever to create equations, using pictures of objects.  Yay!

Fractals

The New York Times has an article about a model of a fractal, the Mosely Snowflake Sponge.  It's a cool thing made out of index cards, on display at the USC library. 

It led me to The Institute for Figuring, which is dedicated to:

the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and engineering.

a site after my own heart.

Learn to fold an origami lobster.  Marvel at the business card Menger Sponge.  Participate in the Crochet Coral Reef project.  The intersection of math and crafts.

 

The Birthday Problem

Another Steven Strogatz.  He discusses the classic birthday problem:  how many people do you have to have in a room in order for there to be a better than even chance that two of them will share a birthday?  The answer, as nobody's intuition tells them, is 23.  The problem is linked to its most famous correspondent, Johnny Carson.  Who, you ask?  Bah!  Click through SS's post to the link to JC's complete digital archive, and find out.

Golden mean

I was never that excited about the golden mean (supposedly the ratio in the Acropolis of its width to its height) despite its link to Fibonacci's sequence, which is awesome.  Steven Strogatz explores the golden mean here, especially focusing on its relationship to pentagons and pentagrams.  Devil worshippers and military-industrial complex conspiracists, you're golden.

It's always worth checking out his bibliography.  It will take you to this movie about Fibonacci, which of course pretends that real nautiluses (nautili?) follow the golden mean.  But watch it anyway.

Maybe you aren't unpopular

Steven Strogatz new column explains why your friends have more friends than you do.

Almost everyone's friends have more friends than they do.  Sounds paradoxical?  Mess with your intuition?  That's the signal that the math behind it might just be interesting.

Thanks to wildscribblings for this link.  See-through airplanes!  I can't wait.

Steven Strogatz restarts his math blog for the NY times.  This time, he's working through the links between math and ourselves.  This entry discusses the topology of fingerprints and cowlicks.  Woo Hoo!

About that background...

How is a sunflower a math problem?

Youtube has the answer.