How much blue do you see? One-fourteenth is certainly an odd number to see around town.
Art Photography
Math Photo: Slope Field in the Sky
I finally made it down to the new Fulton St. subway station. Such a beautiful view from below, like the slope field of a differential equation.
Each of the 88 glass blades of the Sky Reflector-Net is positioned to channel sunlight down throughout the station at different times of day and days of the year. Maybe next year I’ll stop by on the summer solstice.
Appreciation Geometry Photography Resources
Math Photo: Hexagonal Rabbits
The tilling station is one of my favorite exhibits at the Museum of Mathematics. These rabbit tiles create a hexagonal tiling of the plane. Pick any rabbit, and you’ll notice six rabbits all around it; this is exactly how hexagons fit together to tile the plane.
What I really like about this tiling is the the various levels of triangles that emerge. Triangles of rabbits, one of each color, mutually intersect at ears and paws. And I can’t help but seeing the monochromatic rabbit triangles!
Appreciation Photography
Math Photo: Circular Refraction
This simple exhibit at the New York Hall of Science demonstrates a lot of interesting trigonometry. As the light hits the boundary of the semi-circular glass block, it bends back toward the central axis of the system. I can’t look at this without seeing tangents, normals, and angles of incidence and refraction. I wish I had brought my protractor!
Photography
Math Photo: Sorting Algorithms
One of our end-of-school tasks was breaking down all of our Zometool builds from the past year. When a colleague handed me a bag of several hundred red, blue, and yellow struts, I immediately started to struggle and experiment with the most efficient ways to sort the struts for storage.
Should I take them out of the bag one at a time, placing each in its appropriate pile? Or maybe a handful of ten at a time? Or fifty? Ultimately I settled on dumping them out and sliding them around into color-coordinated piles. I’m not sure of the mathematical justification, but my internal optimizer seemed to think this was the right way to go.