Little known fact: some sized Venn Diagrams have never been drawn. In case you missed it when it whipped round Twitter a few weeks ago: it looks like someone finally cracked the 11-Venn diagram, and it’s a cracker!
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A clue to deciphering Kryptos
Kryptos. Photo: Jim Sanborn
You may be aware of Kryptos, the sculpture covered in enciphered text and located outside CIA headquarters (and so not accessible to the general public). Three of the four messages on the sculpture have been decrypted, but the fourth remained obscured. Now the Telegraph reports that the sculptor, Jim Sanborn, who is apparently surprised that the puzzle is unsolved 22 years after the sculpture was created – has offered a clue “by divulging six of the 97 letters in that last phrase”:
On the sculpture, they read NYPVTT. Decoded, they say BERLIN, he disclosed.
Using Computer Modern on the web
Computer Modern is the family of typefaces developed by Donald Knuth for TeX. It’s so good-looking that some scientists do research just so they can write it up in Computer Modern.
I love TeX and everybody knows it, so I was pretty delighted to hear that the cm-unicode project compiles versions of the Computer Modern fonts in a few formats, including TTF. Having the fonts in TTF format means you can use them in non-TeX environments, in particular on the web.
I’ve run the cm-unicode fonts through codeandmore’s @font-face kit generator to get all the weird formats that the various browsers insist on. The result is a set of packages containing everything you need to use the Computer Modern typefaces on the web.
I’ve put up a page containing examples of each face in use and links to the packages. Enjoy!
Manchester MathsJam Recap, August 2012
This month was a small group, but MathsJam is serious business so we got through loads of fun in the time allotted for fun. To start with, we hacked away at Leeds’ tweeted starter for ten:
LDS : As I am alone, starting w/ simple one ; don’t know the answer yet.Is it possible to cut unit square into 3 triangles w/ areas in GP?
— Maths Jam (@MathsJam) August 21, 2012
Let’s talk about X
x
It’s an unpresupposing little letter, $x$. In fact, that’s the reason we use it to represent something we don’t know. But how do you write it down? When Vijay Krishnan tweeted a link to an American college professor’s page on mathematical handwriting, I was shocked to learn that he thought adding a hook to a simple cross was sufficient to differentiate letter-$x$ from times-$\times$.
So I asked our Twitter followers how they write $x$. The Cambrian explosion of diversity in answers I received was eye-opening – I’m glad I asked!
Engineered paper by Matthew Shlian
[vimeo url=http://vimeo.com/47502276]
Matthew Shlian sculpts paper by folding and cutting it.
Knitted Spiky Icosahedron
As an avid knitter, and mathematician, the birth of a small human in my family inspired me to create a mathematical toy for the tiny person to enjoy while learning about shapes. With my favourite platonic solid being the icosahedron, it was the obvious choice for a knitted toy, and with stellation being all the rage, sticking a point on each face was the obvious next step, especially when it’s such a convenient thing for tiny inexperienced hands to grasp.