# Puzzlebomb – October 2015

Puzzlebomb is a monthly puzzle compendium. Issue 46 of Puzzlebomb, for October 2015, can be found here:

Puzzlebomb – Issue 46 – October 2015

The solutions to Issue 46 will be posted at the same time as Issue 47.

Previous issues of Puzzlebomb, and their solutions, can be found here.

# Tessellation Art by Chris Watson

Chris Watson has written in to tell us about his site, Tessellation Art, where he sells his heavily Escher-inspired prints. They’re available in a range of sizes and media, and quite affordably priced. I particularly like the print above, titled Vortex.

# Guest post: Sequence Numbers

This is a guest post, sent in by David, who’s discovered an interesting property of numbers, and is looking for collaborators to take it further.

Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.

– W. S. Anglin

A few years ago I saw a post on a website that showed that the inverse of 998,001 produces a decimal expansion that counts, using three digit strings, from 000 to 997 without error.

$\frac{1}{998,\!001} = 0.0000010020030040050060070080090100110120130\ldots$

I immediately thought that this had to be a hoax. I decided to work it out to prove it was a hoax – after all some people put anything they want on the web whether it is true or not.

# What I did on my summer holidays

This summer my wife and I went to America on our honeymoon. We had a lovely time – it was hot, we saw stripey flags in all sizes, and we marvelled at what substances count as “food” in the land of the free.

But what I really want to tell you about is the National Museum of Mathematics in New York. We couldn’t fly all the way to the East coast of America and not pay a visit. So we did!

# Tiling a finite plane

One of the many jobs we’re gradually getting round to in our new flat is that of tiling a small section of the kitchen surface, which for some reason was left blank by the original builders and all intervening owners. And what better thing to tile it with than binary numbers?

# Review: Snowflake Seashell Star, by Alex Bellos & Edmund Harriss

Snowflake Seashell Star is a new mathematical colouring book, by Alex Bellos and Edmund Harriss, aimed at the lucrative ‘grown-up colouring books’ market that’s sprung up recently, heavily intersected with people who are interested in maths – the book can be used as a regular colouring book, but contains lots of interesting mathematical things, and mathematicians will love it. I wouldn’t have expected anything less from maths adventurer Bellos and mathematical artist and tiling fan Harriss, whose personalities both come through in the book – from the beautiful illustration to the playful style (and there’s a sneaky Harriss Spiral in there too).

The first thing I did in order to properly review the book was check an important mathematical fact, in case anyone was worried. And yes, everything in it is colourable using four colours or fewer. Phew.

# Carnival of Mathematics 126

The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of August, and compiled by Stephen, is now online at CavMaths.

The Carnival rounds up maths blog posts from all over the internet, including some from our own Aperiodical. See our Carnival of Mathematics page for more information.