This is a nice comment-thread and poll on Quora responding to the question “What is the most beautiful equation?”
http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-the-most-beautiful-equation
No surprise to see Euler’s Identity on top with a whopping 350 votes.
There are fun entries all throughout thread, and I definitely learned a few things through perusing. And I guess I can forgive the participants for including some inequalities on the list.
This is a very interesting report from the business consulting firm McKinsey about why top students in U.S. colleges don’t want to become teachers.
For example, of the 1500 students surveyed (all of whom were considered top-third in their schools), only 33 percent thought that they could support a family with this career. And only 37 percent said that people in this job are considered “successful”.
It’s small consolation that two-thirds felt that they, and their families, would be proud to tell people that they were teachers.
Another pleasant way to pass the time at the sea: assembling a family of quadrilaterals!
This is a cool video showing the assembly of an origami Buckyball.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb2lHNqPm7w
The Buckyball is a geometric form named after the architect, designer, and futurist Buckminster Fuller, who used the shape in his designs. It was later discovered that certain carbon molecules take the shape of buckyballs, and it was even recently confirmed that these molecules existed in deep space.
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This is a great poster-style infographic in the New York Times about the how the Kepler telescope looks for planets in space.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/31/science/space/planet.html
The infographic explains in basic terms how Kepler looks at stars in a small square of space and keeps watch for “flickers” of light as potential planets pass in front of them. Larger objects cause a greater “flicker”, naturally, but the actually decrease in brightness is still small. There are also some nice presentations on confirming the existence of planets and the distribution, by mass, size, and orbit size, of the known exoplanets.
And it’s working: six new planets, and counting!