Looking for small/inexpensive items to put inside a piece of festive footwear (or, to keep for yourself)? Here’s a selection of things we’ve seen lately that you might want to buy! All the items we’re showing are under £20, and range from slightly mathematical to very mathematical.
You're reading: Posts Tagged: fractal
Fractal Bunting Competition – results
A few weeks ago, we announced a competition to design some fractal bunting, without giving too much of a particular guide as to what we were looking for, in order to spark people’s creativity and get them making (or imagining) some lovely mathematical decorations with which to festoon things. We had a large range of types of entry, and it’s given us some inspiration for how we might (infinitely) brighten up the place.
Since we know much more about fractals than we do about design, we asked illustrator Hana Ayoob to help judge the entries on their aesthetic merit, and here we present some of our favourite entries, along with the announcement of the winner.
Aperiodical Design Competition: Fractal Bunting
Since people might be looking for something distracting they can do at home around now, we’re running another fun competition to keep you occupied – much like our π-ku poetry competition in July, we’re looking for anyone who has a spare slice of brain to come up with a design for our fractal bunting competition.
HLF Blogs – Math ⇔ Art: the Gosper curve
This week, Katie and Paul are blogging from the Heidelberg Laureate Forum – a week-long maths conference where current young researchers in maths and computer science can meet and hear talks by top-level prize-winning researchers. For more information about the HLF, visit the Heidelberg Laureate Forum website.
Running alongside the 5th HLF is an exhibition of mathematical art by the astrophysicist Aldo Spizzichino. He’s taken ideas from mathematics, and used his own set of programs (in Fortran, no less) to produce his images, a couple of dozen of which are on display in the Old University building a few steps from the forum. Although all the pieces were generating discussion as I looked round the exhibition on Sunday morning, I’ve picked two to talk a bit about, both based on the same piece of maths.
Kickstart the Mandelmap poster: a vintage style map of the Mandelbrot set
Here’s something fun you might want to spend some money on: a poster of the Mandelbrot set, in the style of an old-fashioned navigation chart.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/billtavis/mandelmap-poster-a-vintage-style-map-of-the-mandel
The Kickstarter has already racked up many multiples of the original funding goal with three weeks still to go, so it’s at the “effectively a pre-order” stage. The posters start at \$26.
Kickstarter: Mandelmap poster by Bill Tavis.
London MathsJam Recap, May 2015
I know I usually write up the goings-on at Manchester MathsJam, but since I spent much of the last month ‘In Residence’ at the University of Greenwich, I spent the second-to-last Tuesday evening of May at the London MathsJam. Here’s a summary of what transpired.
Mandelbrot’s bum is full of π
They say that $\pi$ is everywhere. (They say that about $\phi$ too, but I’m not buying it.) I thought it would be interesting to discuss the most unexpected place I’m aware it’s ever appeared.