The New York Times Magazine’s Year in Ideas is definitely one of my favorite reads of the year.
My personal recommendations are Perfect Parallel Parking and The Train That Never Stops. Would anyone believe that I’ve been thinking of this kind of train system for years?
My love of binder clips makes me appreciate this binder clip sphere even more.
This is another excellent installment of Math Monday at Make Magazine by George Hart, curator of the Museum of Mathematics.
You can find the instructions here.
This is a fancier version of a well-known Hans Rosling video showing correlations between life-expectancy and income across time periods and geographical regions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
It’s truly a beautiful representation, and it really helps make sense of a large set of multi-dimensional data.
The original version is a bit more academic in feel, but you can’t blame Rosling for going a little Hollywood here.
This is a fun and clever idea: convert the decimal expansion of Pi into base 27 and name the “digits” A, B, C, D, … . This creates a way to decode numbers into words and phrases (the ‘0’ digit is interpreted to be a space, or a punctuation mark).
With this in place, you you can search for your name (or any phrase) in the infinite expansion of Pi!
http://www.dr-mikes-maths.com/pisearch.html
This will certainly excite all those cosmological conspiracy theorists out there!
Related Posts
This is a collection of around 200 free online math books.
http://planetmath.org/?op=mscbrowse&from=books
It seems like many of these are pretty advanced, but it’s nice to know that when you are ready to learn about Geometrodynamics and Nontrigonometric Fourier Analysis, the resources are out there.
Could this be yet another nail in the coffin of textbook publishers? Let’s cross our fingers.