Here are the most popular Math Photos from MrHonner.com for 2014. Click here to see more.
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| Escalating Ellipses | Undersea Rose Curve | Solids of Revolution |
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| Ten Pi Radians | Manhole Math Art | Non-Fibonacci Flooring |
I’ve always loved tree rings, in part because the word dendrochronology fascinated me a child. This lovely cross-section evokes so many mathematical ideas: concentricity, network theory, and polar representations, to name a few.
I can’t look at this lovely jellyfish without seeing a four-petal rose curve in the polar plane.
Ever since I noticed this pothole pentagon, I’ve been looking down a lot more.
The lovely mathematical designs on this this manhole cover immediately put me in mind of the labyrinths of Robert Bosch. And then later I realized this work resembled another piece from a Bridges artist: Tim Locke’s Starburst.
Naturally, the geometry of this simple piece of playground equipment caught my eye, but the shadows really sparked my interest.
The shadows are the projections of the edges of this pyramid, and they form a set of angles on the ground. Notice immediately that the largest angle (the shadow formed by the “back” face) is the sum of the other three angles.
There are many other interesting questions to ask, and relationships to explore. What I was most curious about, however, is how accurately we could locate the sun in the sky based only on this information.