This is a mind-blowing set of math/art projects by Daniel Walsh.
http://danielwalsh.tumblr.com/
At the right is a visualization of the magnetic field created by a small triangle of buckyball magnets.
There are only a few posts here, but they are fascinating and stunningly beautiful. I hope there are more coming!
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I admit it. The only reason I bought this squash
was to see if I could use Geogebra to fit a curve to it, like this.
And let me tell you, figuring out that this equation did the job
was not as easy as I thought it would be.
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This is a great interactive Rock-Paper-Scissors game from the New York Times website:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/rock-paper-scissors.html
The computer will narrate its strategy for you as you play, telling you whether it has correctly predicted your choice or not.
Skeptical? Play the game against the Veteran computer and watch it beat you! Then, go check out this infographic for some tips on how to improve your play.
It might be fun to pit a 6-sided die against the computer to see what happens.
This video demonstrates the Original Odhner mechanical calculator.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz8_tNDUDog
It looks like a miniature typewriter, and it seems to operate in the same manner as the Curta mechanical calculator: switches allow you to “input” numbers into the machine, and then turning a crank performs addition or subtraction.
The video demonstrates some basic operations of the Odhner, and it includes a nice (if lengthy) computation of the square root of 2 that involves a few arithmetic tricks.
A Japanese man has set a new world record by computing 5 trillion digits of pi.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70J7S220110120
Apparently Shigeru Kondo accomplished this feat using a home-built computer that worked non-stop for 90 days. Apart from this dramatic triumph for mathematical hobbyists (Kondo is a systems analyst for a food company), the article contains the following two excellent lines:
“Calculating a more accurate pi, which is believed to go on forever, has been a challenge for scholars for thousands of years.” Believed to go on forever? Is the reporter some kind of mathematical agnostic?
And this, from Kondo himself: “I really want to praise my computer, which calculated continuously for three months without complaint.” Credit where credit is due, I suppose.
It is interesting to note that, while 5 trillion is indeed the new record for consecutive digits of pi, researchers at Yahoo were able to compute digits that are much farther out than that; they just don’t know all the digits that lead up to it!