One of many witty, math-y cartoons from www.xkcd.com:
To create this, I think you’d need to draw panels both on the front and the back of a strip of paper, making sure that the end of one side can precede (or follow) the end on the other side in the story. I imagine it would be best if the circular story had no beginning or end.
This is a lovely three-minute visual homage to the Fibonacci sequence and its relationship to various natural phenomena.
I found this attempt to quantify the decline in quality of M. Night Shyamalan’s movies very amusing:
Using the rotten tomatoes rankings is a very interesting idea. I wonder what other kinds of analyses could incorporate that data.
Martin Gardner, who died on May 22, 2010, shared the beauty, mystery, and most of all, the fun of mathematics with the world. I remember watching the episode of “The Nature of Things” linked below, captivated by the reach of mathematics and the passion and ingenuity of these mathematicians–mathematicians who loved magic, juggling, computer games, and debunking con-artists.
The passion of Martin Gardner reached many people; there’s no denying the impact this television show had on me.
Suppose an organization is hosting a banquet with tables numbered 1 through 12, and they are looking for a fun, math-y way to get guests to their assigned table. So, when the guests arrive and find their name-card in the lobby, they must solve a simple math problem to determine their seating assignment.
It’s easy to figure out simple math problems whose answers are the numbers 1 through 12–the tough part is to do it in some uniform way, as with a theme. For example, a past theme for this event was to use mathematical expressions that only involved the number 4: thus, ( 4 / 4 ) would be table 1, or ( 4 ^ 4 – 4 / 4 ) / ( 4 + 4 – 4 / 4 ) would be table x.
My suggestion was to have a string of two of the four letters A,B,C, or D on each card in some order. A guest’s table number would then be that string’s position in the alphabetical order of all such strings (AB would be table 1, for example).
If you can think of something more interesting, the banquet isn’t until September. But it’s really 60 tables, not 12.