A book about mental arithmetic? By Rob Eastaway? Count me in! In my fuzzy mental Euler diagram of topics and authors, Maths On The Back Of An Envelope lies in the intersection of several ‘favourite’ circles. Perhaps paradoxically, this meant I was expecting to be a little disappointed: how can a book, by an author…
At work we’ve got a 3D printer. In this series of posts I’ll share some of the designs I’ve made. At the start of the Summer we (I) bought a new 3D printer for the department, a FlashForge Dreamer. It’s got two extruder heads, so it can do two-colour prints. To test that out, I…
At work we’ve got a 3D printer. In this series of posts I’ll share some of the designs I’ve made. The roof of the Sheldonian theatre in Oxford, built from 1664 to 1669, is constructed from timber beams which are unsupported apart from at the walls, and held together only by gravity.
At work we’ve got a 3D printer. In this series of posts I’ll share some of the designs I’ve made. This shape is a “spherical pseudo-cuboctahedron”, prompted by a request from Jim Propp on the math-fun mailing list. It has 24 vertices, 12 edges and 14 faces. That doesn’t satisfy Euler’s formula $V – E…
At work we’ve got a 3D printer. In this series of posts I’ll share some of the designs I’ve made. This is one of the first ‘proper’ things I’ve designed – I wanted to have a go at making something based on an object I already had. A colleague asked if I could make some…
The next issue of the Carnival of Mathematics, rounding up blog posts from the month of October, is now online at Woolly Thoughts and Mental Blocks. 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.
Tim has previously written guest posts here about tiling by tricurves, and is now looking at ways of tiling with other shapes. In an earlier post elsewhere I covered some basic arc-sided shapes that tile by themselves. Lately I’ve been playing with groups of curved tiling shapes, asking a question common for me: how to…