Technology

Folding Steel

This is an amazing application of origami:  a steel grocery bag that can fold flat!

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/03/paper-plastic-or-steel.html

Although you probably wouldn’t want to carry these to the store with you, this result could have real applications in industrial packaging.  In addition, it’s another step towards the mathematical-origamist’s dream:  designing building that can rearrange and rebuild itself as needed!

A great talk by Erik Demaine on mathematical origami opened my eyes have this amazing application of mathematics, and my students and I have been having a lot of fun with folding ever since!

By patrick honner, ago

Cam-based Mathematics

This is an awesome old-school style video demonstrating how simple cam-based mechanical systems can be implemented to process numbers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F7m02XDfvE

Calculating reciprocals, squares, and tangents using rotating disks:  it’s amazing stuff!  I wish I had seen (and appreciated) something like this as a young student.  It might have made me appreciate engineering a little more.

Be sure to check out the barrel cam at the end that is used to compute gun elevation.  I imagine something like this is at the heart of the mechanical calculators out there.

By patrick honner, ago

Mathematical Documentaries

This is a nice collection of mathematics-themed documentaries:

http://www.cosmolearning.com/mathematics/documentaries/

There are 30 or so documentaries here, many from the BBC’s Topics in the History of Mathematics, such as Non-Euclidean Geometry and the Birth of the Calculus.

Other documentaries of interest include biographies of Florence Nightingale (whose contribution to statistics is often overlooked) and John Nash (Nobel prize winner and subject of the film A Beautiful Mind).

There are also a number of traditional lecture series available as well.

By patrick honner, ago

Geogebra Resources

This is an amazing collection of hundreds (thousands?) of well-designed Geogebra worksheets:

http://dmentrard.free.fr/GEOGEBRA/Maths/accueilmath.htm

The author, Daniel Mentrard, has put together a huge library of mathematics and physics demonstrations/explorations that are all available for free.

Although the site is in French, it’s not too hard to browse the many Geogebra resources covering Arithmetique, Art et Maths, Algebre, and much more.

And if you like, you can always run the website through Google Translate.

By patrick honner, ago

4.74 Degrees of Separation

This story in the New York Times summarizes a recently published study about interconnectedness on Facebook.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and-me-4-74-degrees.htmlhttp://goo.gl/sqIVT

A computational analysis of the 721 million worldwide Facebook users shows that the average distance between two people is about 4.74 “friends”.   Roughly speaking, given anyone in the world on Facebook, a friend of your friend is likely to be friends with a friend of their friend.

An amazing result!  And a cool application of graph and network theory.  Now the questions becomes “What can we do with this knowledge?”

By patrick honner, ago
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