Today we celebrate a Permutation Day! I call days like today permutation days because the digits of the day and the month can be rearranged to form the year.
We can also consider today a Transposition Day, as we need only a single transposition (an exchange of two numbers) to turn the year into the day and date.
Celebrate Permutation Day by mixing things up! Try doing things in a different order today. Just remember, for some operations, order definitely matters!
Mathematician, artist, and 3D-printing virtuoso Henry Segerman will be speaking at the Museum of Mathematics on October 5th, 2016.
Henry is currently a professor at Oklahoma State University, where he researches geometry, topology, and mathematical visualization. His mathematical 3D printing is truly amazing: to start, you can check out his triple gears, stereographic projections, and Hilbert curves. And he has recently published a book, Visualizing Mathematics with 3D Printing, that includes companion 3D prints that readers can download for free and print themselves! He is also involved in fascinating work in spherical video (see this spherical droste video for an example) and virtual reality, and has been featured in several Numberphile videos.
Henry will be giving a talk as part of MoMath’s Math Encounters series. His talk is titled “3D Shadows: Casting Light on the Fourth Dimension”, and is sure to make for a fascinating evening. I am proud and excited to be introducing Henry, whom I’ve known for many years, and whose work inspires me both as a mathematician and as a teacher.
You can find out more about the event and register here.
UPDATE: The museum has made Henry’s full talk is available here.
Happy Pythagorean Perfect Square Day!
We’ve had a lot of fun dates this year: several Geometric Mean Days, several Square Days, and even a Power of 2 Day! But I’m pretty sure that the numbers of dates all being perfect squares and satisfying the Pythagorean Theorem is the rarest of them all!
I’d never looked closely at the Parachute Jump in Coney Island, but recently noticed the octagons at each vertex of the dodecagon 250 feet up in the sky. It really is a beautiful structure, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not it deserves to be called “the Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn”.
Related Posts
Happy Geometric Mean Day! The geometric mean of two numbers a and b is
which makes today a Geometric Mean Day!
A consequence of this is that the numbers in today’s date form a geometric progression
and here is one way to visualize that relationship
