I admit it. The only reason I bought this squash
was to see if I could use Geogebra to fit a curve to it, like this.
And let me tell you, figuring out that this equation did the job
was not as easy as I thought it would be.
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This is a nice, no-frills, on-line mathematics encyclopedia from the publishing company Springer.
For some reason, this site is hosted on the German Springer site. That’s probably not a good sign.
The entries range widely in length and depth, but it’s another good resource to have available.
It was superhero day at school, and a senior had donned some fake glasses as his costume. Confused, I inquired as to which superhero he was supposed to be. “Clark Kent,” he said. “Clark Kent is not a superhero,” I said. “Superman is a superhero, and Clark Kent is his alter ego.”
A rousing debate ensued. Well, it wasn’t really a debate; it was pretty much me against everyone else.
“No one calls out for Clark Kent in desperation,” I said. I was being difficult in my typical way. Yes, I was trying to make a legitimate philosophical point, but mostly I was just trying to intellectually irritate the students. The controlled chaos of classroom debate continued
“Bruce Wayne is not a superhero!” I was growing more confident in my stance, and sensed the argument drawing to a close. I was ready to claim victory. Then a clever student raised her hand. The class quieted.
“Clark Kent is Superman. Superman is a superhero. Therefore, by transitivity, Clark Kent is a superhero.”
In a rare moment, I had no clever response. In light of this stunningly elegant argument, I was forced to concede. But I’ll be back.
Inspired by a brilliant talk by Erik Demaine, I started playing around with the famous one-cut problem: given a shape made up of straight line segments, can you fold the paper flat in such a way that with only one straight cut your shape will appear?
Having no real experience with mathematical paper folding, I thought I’d try out a Koch Curve. Well, a finite iteration of it, at least.
It seemed like the strategy was to use the symmetry of the shape to make all the line segments line up on each other. So I folded down the middle, and then again down the new middle.
I rotated the last shape and it seemed a little clearer how to continue.
It seemed like all the lines were lined up, so to speak. So I cut. And voila!
Not too bad! Now, if I could just figure out how to do this with non-symmetric figures.
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