Maths Week England happened a couple of weeks ago. I had put my name on the speaker directory, and sure enough a maths lead from a primary school in County Durham emailed me to ask if I could go in and do something for them.
You're reading: cp’s mathem-o-blog
Beach Spectres update – I’ve made a big tile!
Here’s an update on my progress in the Beach Spectres project. I’ve put out two update videos since the last post but failed to write a post here. I promise I’m trying my best to be more organised than usual!
Let’s go to the beach and make an aperiodic tiling!
Somehow, I’ve been awarded the MEGA grant, from Matt Parker and Talking Maths in Public, for a ridiculous public maths project. I’d better get on that, then!
My plan is to go to the beach and use great big cookie cutters in the shape of the spectre aperiodic monotile to cover as much space as possible.
What on earth is the infinite least squares beanstalk?
I’m trying something a bit different. Here’s a ten-minute video about a sequence I found on the OEIS.
Breaking enneahedron news!
A nice person called Payton Asch sent me an email with an observation about the Herschel enneahedron:
It looks like the underlying polytope for the enneahedron is a triangular bipyramid (two tetrahedra stacked on top of each other) or the dual polytope would be a triangular prism.
In the case of the triangular bipyramid you would truncate each of the vertices around the “equator” deep enough until the truncated areas meet at a vertex.
The Herschel enneahedron on Numberphile
Me! On Numberphile! Who would’ve thought it?
Earlier this year, Brady Haran visited Newcastle to record a video with some Leverhulme scholars. Luckily for me he had a bit of spare time to record a video with me, so we did one about the Herschel enneahedron, which I first looked at back in 2013.
There were a few common questions among the comments on YouTube. I thought I’d quickly respond to them here.
Any way you cut it
I’d like to cut a rectangle into a 3×4 grid of squares. To minimise the number of cuts, should I cut three long strips first, or four short strips? Does it matter?