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.
Aperiodvent, Day 5: Dodecorations
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…
Aperiodvent Day 2: Sprouts
Did you know there’s a mathematical game called Sprouts? It’s a game played by drawing dots and lines on paper, and while it seems simple, there’s actually some interesting maths – graph theory and game theory – behind it. According to Wikipedia: The game is played by two players, starting with a few spots drawn…
Aperiodvent Day 1: Other Mathematical Advent Calendars
In what can only be described as a poor marketing move, here are some recommendations for other mathsy advent calendars around the internet. For teachers and students, and anyone else really, the wonderful NRICH produce two advent calendars of great activity ideas – one for Primary and one for Secondary. Friend of the site and…