A headline appears on my screen: “Ancient and Modern People Followed Same Mathematical Rule To Build Cities”, on Slashdot.
Ooh, I get to break out my “holy power law, Batman” image again! Yippee!
Ctrl+F “power law” – no hits. That’s odd.
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Apiological: mathematical speculations about bees (Part 3: Travelling Salesman)
This is part 3 of a three-part series of mathematical speculations about bees. Part 1 looked at honeycomb geometry, and part 2 looked at how bees estimate nest volumes.
The sight of bumblebees roaming around British gardens, foraging for nectar, is common and comforting. The movement of these fuzzy bees between flowers and plants can often seem deliberate yet erratic. Charles Darwin was intrigued by “humble-bee” routines ((Bumblebees were generally known as “humble-bees” until the modern term really caught on in the 1890s.)), and observed them with the assistance of his six children, but always regretted not attaching strands of cotton wool to the bees so he could follow them more easily ((Freeman, Charles Darwin on the Routes of Male Humblebees)).
Within the last decade there has been renewed interest from a number of collaborating researchers into studying bumblebees’ movement between flowers and their foraging techniques. The prevailing journalistic spin on this research seems to be ‘Bees solve the Travelling Salesman Problem – a problem that mathematicians and computers cannot solve’. This is unfortunate, not least because it is gleefully misleading, confusing various meanings of ‘solve’, but also it obscures a lot of the fascinating underlying scientific investigations.
Carnival of Mathematics 120
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of February, and compiled by Manan, is now online at Math Misery.
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.
A geometrical approximation for π
If you were paying very close attention last week, you’ll have noticed my attempt to come up with an estimate of π, geometrically, as part of The Aperiodical’s π Day challenge (even if it’s not really π Day):
Oo, my second effort at estimating π came to 3.14151, correct to 0.003%! cc @aperiodical pic.twitter.com/2vuvys0mka
— Colin Beveridge (@icecolbeveridge) March 10, 2015
π and constrained writing
It’s a tool; a ratio, providing us simple rules for doing circular estimates. Admired regularly – and we all remember that today’s pi! Hooray! Let’s eat pie.
You may have noticed that the first paragraph of this article was immensely poorly written, and didn’t sound like good writing at all. And you’d be right – except writing it wasn’t easy as you’d think. I’ve written it under a constraint – that is, I’ve picked an arbitrary rule to follow, and have had to choose my words carefully in order to do so.
Interesting π Esoterica
My way of celebrating π day is to rummage through my trove of obscure writings and dig up some interesting esoterica on the subject of that constant. Here’s what I found.
In case you’re new to this: every now and then I encounter a paper or a book or an article that grabs my interest but isn’t directly useful for anything. It might be about some niche sub-sub-subtopic I’ve never heard of, or it might talk about something old from a new angle, or it might just have a funny title. I put these things in my Interesting Esoterica collection on Mendeley. And then when I’ve gathered up enough, I collect them here.
I bought three.onefouronefivenine.com
I’m a big fan of novelty domain names: I once bought hotmathematicians.com just so that christian@hotmathematicians.com could be my corresponding address when I submitted a paper. That domain has expired, but my love for one-shot novelty purchases has not!
To celebrate π day this year, I decided that it should be possible to type a little bit of π into the internet and be given the rest of it. You can have dots in domain names, so a domain like “three.something.com” is possible. I only know π to two decimal places off the top of my head, so I was dismayed to learn that onefour.com is being squatted.
After a bit of googling to find more digits of π (hey, this website will be really useful once I set it up!), I found the first decimal approximation which hasn’t already been registered:
three.onefouronefivenine.com
Try going there now. It really exists!
I’ve set it up so you get an endlessly scrolling list of decimal digits of π, generated using my favourite unbounded spigot algorithm. I suppose you can consider this my entry in our π approximation challenge.
A good π day’s work.