This is a beautiful slideshow highlighting 2010 in Found Math, from the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).
http://www.maa.org/community/columns/maa-found-math/2010-maa-found-math-gallery
This is a really cool project–catching photos of the math all around us–and there are a lot of really beautiful pictures here. Keep your cameras on you!
Maybe I’ll submit a few of mine next year; perhaps the shadow tetrahedron, or the parabolic hillside.
This is a wonderful demonstration of the scale of the universe.
http://primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale_of_universe/
By zooming in and out, you travel through space-time comparing and contrasting objects with magnitudes on the order of galaxies, planets, humans, atoms, and strings. A really creative and beautiful application.
I’m surprised that there aren’t more hexagons around town. It really is a lovely shape.
This is a brilliant video introduction to the fine mathematical art of doodling.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heKK95DAKms
This video–one of several from vi hart–is an engaging, witty, and serious look at the mathematics one can explore just by doodling and playing around with a few basic ideas. Sophisticated concepts in graph theory and knot theory spring up from some very simple, and very beautiful, sketches.
The creator of the videos is a bit hard on math teachers in her narration; apparently she’s had some bad ones. The snarkiness definintely adds character to the videos, but it’s a bit excessive at times.
I’m sure it isn’t easy making innovative, mind-opening videos like this, but it isn’t easy teaching a class full of doodling students, either!
