Dear Mathematician,
My partner and I are trying to buy a house. We both work in different places, and neither of us enjoys commuting. How could we decide where to live?
Fictionally yours,
Norman Mettrick
Norman,
Thank you for your intriguing and entirely imaginary letter. The short and not terribly useful answer would be:
In what flipping dimension is a square peg in a round hole just as good as a round peg in a square hole?
Let’s start at the beginning.
My Plus magazine puzzle from March asks “Which gives a tighter fit: a square peg in a round hole or a round peg in a square hole?” By “tighter” we mean that a higher proportion of the hole is occupied by the peg.
[vimeo url=http://vimeo.com/40641882]
Peter’s site is full of beautifully stark geometric/topological art
If you’ve heard of Felix Klein, it’s probably due to the Klein bottle, that strange four-dimensional object that is the subject of a new video here on The Aperiodical starring Katie Steckles and Matt Parker. Who is Klein and, apart from the bottle, what did he do?
Klein’s Times obituary records that he would point out “with a smile” that his date of birth comprised three squares of primes. So then, I will refer to his birth as taking place on the $( 5^2 )^{\textrm{th}}$ day of the $(2^2 )^{\textrm{th}}$ month in the year $43^2$ in Prussia. You might like to notice that today is the $( 5^2)^{\textrm{th}}$ day of the $( 2^2 )^{\textrm{th}}$ month as well, so it is the 163rd anniversary of Klein’s birth.
Money Polyhedra by Kristi Malakoff:
Scientific American are reporting that “a team of mathematicians has for the first time succeeded in simulating a panoply of snowflake shapes using basic conservation laws, such as preserving the number of water molecules in the air”.
This explains that previous simulations often simulate the crystal surface using interlocking triangles, but that:
the triangles often deform and collapse in simulations, leading to singularities that bring the simulation to an abrupt halt… Garcke’s team got around this difficulty by devising a method to describe the curvature and other geometric information about the snowflake surface so that it could be appropriately encoded into a computer.
Tiles by Claesson Koivisto Rune:
