By stitching carefully between a set of points, you can create a parabola – these Christmas cards have taken this idea and given it a festive twist.
Aperiodvent, Day 6: Hexagonal Snowflakes
Six is the number of sides on a hexagon, and hexagonal symmetry is one of the most wintry symmetries – due to the bond angle of water when frozen into ice, all snowflakes (with some minor exceptions) have hexagonal symmetry.
Aperiodvent, Day 5: Dodecorations
If you’re thinking about decorating your house for the festive season, we recommend the Twelve Pentagons of Christmas – dodecahedrons. Here’s a few ways to get more regular twelve-sided polyhedra into your life.
LaTeX/TikZ to draw a star graph $K_{1,n}$
For a diagram for a class this week, I’ve written a LaTeX command to draw star graphs using TikZ. A star graph $K_{1,n}$ is a graph with a single central node, $n$ radial nodes, and $n$ edges connecting the central node to each radial node. I am sharing this here in case it is useful…
Aperiodvent, Day 4: Möbius Paper Chains
If you’re trying to think of ways to decorate your home, office or classroom, look no further than mathematically non-trivial paper chains, made from Möbius bands. All you need is some double-sided coloured paper (ideally the same colour on both sides, but if you want to show off the twist, you can go two-tone) cut…
Aperiodvent Day 3: Mince Pi Pendulum
Today’s contribution is from friend of the site, Festival of the Spoken Nerd’s Matt Parker, who’s found a way to approximate π using a mince pie (or any type of pie, or indeed any small object with non-zero mass, but the mince pie is the most festive option). The trick is to use it as…
The Maths Podcast to end all Maths Podcasts
At the MathsJam weekend gathering earlier this month, we found ourselves invited to join maths podcasting supremo Samuel Hansen for a recording session. Nothing unusual there: podcasts have been recorded at MathsJam before. But this time Samuel wanted to record more than one podcast at the same time – since many of the maths podcasting…