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Nikki Graziano was a photography and math student at Rochester Institute of Technology, and she found the perfect way to combine her passions. Graziano examines the shapes that appear in her photographs and overlays the mathematical functions that best describe them. More »
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Ever seen the little 'You Are Here' dot on a map of the airport, or the mall, or any other structure? That's a demonstration of the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem. Violently shaken martini shakers and crumpled pieces of paper are also demonstrations. It's all over the place. Take a look at one of the weirdest, and most powerful, proofs out there. More »
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There is a famous mathematical proof called The Jordan Curve Theorem. It's wrong. Camille Jordan came up with it at the end of the 19th century, and it bears his name, despite being inaccurate, because there is no justice in the world. There are plenty of proofs out there that are wrong, but this one is notable for proving something so very, very simple. Find out how hard it is to prove an obvious statement. More »
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In between painting the Mona Lisa and idly designing flying machines for fun, Leonardo Da Vinci occasionally got outside and looked up every now and again. Because he was Da Vinci, the moment he did, he discovered a new natural law. This one was about trees, and after five hundred years, scientists are still trying to figure out why the law worked in the first place. More »
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Everyone knows about The Mobius Strip, the loop of paper with a twist in the middle that has only one surface. Now imagine taking a disk and gluing its edge to the edge of the Mobius strip. This will give you a Boy Surface, and one of the weirdest planets conceivable. More »
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In the 1970s, a remarkable thing was done; a computer was used to solve a math problem. This, in and of itself, was not remarkable. The difference engine could do it. But this problem was the first one that would probably remain unsolved if it weren't for computers. Find out about the Four-Color Theorem, and why it needed to be turned over to the machines, below. More »
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Alternate dimensions aren't outside our everyday experience. In fact, we can use exotic dimensions, like fractional dimensions, to measure things as common as coastlines. Find out about the Hausdorff Dimension before your next trip to the sea. More »
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JM Parrondo is a casino and con artist's worst nightmare. In the 1990s, he invented two games that are sure to lose you everything. They're both mathematically designed to make you go broke, but play them one after another and you are guaranteed to win. More »
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Nicolas Bourbaki spent much of the twentieth century publishing rigorous and revolutionary papers on mathematics. So why haven't you heard of him? Because he never existed. He was the name taken by a secret society of French mathematicians with some very odd rules. More »
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Find out how omniscience can let one opponent make a chump of another in one paradoxical game but get completely trounced in another. Game theory at its weirdest, folks. More »
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This strangely-named theorem has a rarefied theoretical background, arising from a perfectly round ball covered with perfectly fine hair. Despite that, it has real-world applications, including the ability to build gold nanowires — and finding the one spot on earth where there is no wind. More »
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A pair of pi enthusiasts have calculated the largest chunk of the mathematical constant yet, reaching just over 10 trillion digits. Alexander Yee and Shigeru Kondo, respectively a computer scientist in the US and a systems engineer in Japan, fought hard-drive failures and narrowly missed widespread technical disruptions due to the Japan earthquake to break their previous Guinness world record of 5 trillion digits. More »
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Amicable Numbers are definitive proof that mathematicians are very inventive, but too often bored. When you put both these qualities together, you get a bunch of people making up new kinds of numbers to be interested in. The most endearingly-named of these numbers are called Amicable Numbers. More »
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Most likely, you've already seen the Superegg before. It's a shape that came into vogue in the 1960s, and has been showing up ever since. It's an 'egg' that has the ability to stand stable on either end, and it turns out to have many uses. More »
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Basketball fans are all familiar with terms like "hot hands," "on a roll," or "in the zone," that are used to describe players demonstrating what appears to be a streak of above-average performance. For over two decades, scientists have debated whether the phenomenon actually exists, or if basketball fans simply attribute non-random patterns to completely random data (something we humans have been shown to be very good at). More »
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I'm standing amidst a throng of people in the entrance hall of Harvard University's historic Sanders theatre. Before me stands a man, wielding a flash light, who is coated from head to toe in gleaming silver body paint; he is wearing nothing, save for a pair of reading glasses and a tiny, aluminum-colored speedo. To my right, a scientist in a lab coat is working away feverishly at the bellows of an accordion. On my left, Nobel laureate Roy Glauber (physics, 2005) squeezes past me with a smile and a nod. Oh, and I'm pretty sure I just saw Amanda Palmer. More »
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The brand new 42nd season of Sesame Street will be brought to you by STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math)! This year, the word on the Street is all about Math and Science. Which means Elmo singing about the number 10 with Elvis Costello, science experiments, and learning about engineering by launching a puppet out of a cannon! More »
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Emergence is the word used to describe what happens when a system becomes more than the combination of its pieces. A set of rules, group of animals, or collection of objects can develop special properties that none of the single pieces possess. The exact cause of this transformation is impossible to pin down, and yet it happens each branch of science. From the wisdom of crowds to fluid dynamics - we call it emergence. More »
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There are similarities in the way a bird flies through the air and a dolphin swims through the water. And yet how do you compare the flap of a butterfly to the enormous movement of a blue whale? The best way, it turns out, is with their respective Strouhal Numbers. More »
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The leopard and the jaguar are renowned for their lovely spotted coats, and tigers for their stripes. Math and genetics show us how we can get the same things for our own offspring — along with why no striped animals have spotted tails. More »
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In order to calculate odds in a multiverse, a certain conceit has to be thrown down which 'ends time' for certain universes. This means that, conceptually at least, universes are destroyed. And so a group of intrepid theorists set out to save universes by saving time, and may have discovered a way to do it. More »
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How many people need to be crowded into a room before two of them are likely to have the same birthday? The answer is a mere 23 to have a fifty-fifty shot. To bring the probability to ninety-nine percent, you need a crowd of only fifty-seven people. And yet there are three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. What's going on? More »
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It goes by many names: the hypercube, the 8-cell, or the octochoron. It is represented by many shapes; a small cube inside a larger cube, two cubes connected by a bridge, a cube with slightly skewed angles. All the tesseract's names and shapes are attempts to visualize what we can never understand. What does the fourth dimension look like? More »
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It's the end of a long action movie. The hero and villain are in a mad chase over a city skyline to deactivate and trigger a nuclear bomb, respectively. The villain throws himself down on a daringly curved piece of architecture with the intent to slide to the bottom of the curve and reach the trigger first. The hero (probably played by Angelina Jolie doing parkour) throws herself into the air and hits a lower part of the curve, intending to get ahead of the villain. Alas! As they slide, the villain catches up to her, and they both end the curve at the same time. The situation can now only be resolved via fistfight with sweet flips. More »
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If there's anything we learn from math teachers and the Da Vinci Code, it's that prime numbers are magic. They can do anything, and be anywhere. Including a doodle on a math paper. More »
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The Banach-Tarski Dupla-Shrinker recently made an appearance on an episode of Futurama. Using it, Bender got to make two, slightly smaller, copies of himself. The smaller Benders are why they added the 'shrinker' part of the name. The actual Banach-Tarski theorem allows an object to spawn a perfect copy of itself, at its exact size, just by being chopped into bits. More »
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The Collatz conjecture is also known as the "3n + 1" problem. It's an easy problem to explain and check, and has been tested up into the nineteen figure range. But it's only now that anyone has come forward claiming a proof that it always works. More »
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This Escher-looking structure is the Klein Bottle. It exists only in four dimensions, has only one surface, and contains itself. See what happens when the Möbius Strip turns to drink. More »
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The notion of infinity is fundamentally beyond the human ability to comprehend, but that hasn't stopped mathematicians from trying. So just what is infinity, and why is there more than one of them? And just what is infinity plus one? More »
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There are numbers out there that are so enormously, impossibly vast that to even write them down would require the entire universe. But here's the really crazy thing...some of these incomprehensibly huge numbers are crucial for understanding the world. More »
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Archaeologists have dug up many ancient, notched bones all around the world, but the Ishango bone is different. On it, there are markings that suggest its owners were making the first attempts at actual mathematics. More »
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Kurt Gödel was best known as a mathematician and secondarily known as an extreme eccentric. After his death, he became known for something else: creating an ontological proof of the existence of God. More »
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The Mundurucu tribe are an isolated group living deep within the Amazon rainforest. Their language doesn't have exact terms for numbers or words for most geometric shapes...and yet they outperformed French and American schoolchildren on a geometry test. More »
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A couple of years ago, two geographers created one of the most chilling maps you'll ever see - it shows what kinds of natural hazards are most likely to kill you in America. And which regions are the most deadly. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5803268&view=rss&microfeed=true In an article published in the Cochrane Review, researchers have shown that people don't really understand statistics. That's not news, but now we have proof that our poor grasp of stats can be bad for our health. Statistics have a huge influence on a how effective people think drugs are - except, of course, it's the wrong influence. For example, in a case where a drug lowers the risk of contracting a disease, there are four ways to describe its effects. According to the researchers, these are: More »
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The Fibonacci Series, a set of numbers that increases rapidly, began as a medieval math joke about how fast rabbits breed. But it's became a source of insight into art, architecture, nature, and efficiency. This mathematical game explains the structures of leaves and lungs, is replicated in paintings and photographs, and pops up as the basis for the pyramids, the Parthenon, and packing efficiency. Find out where the Fibonacci Sequence comes from and why it keeps eerily showing up. More »
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As any man will tell you (especially in the weeks before Valentine's Day), gift-giving is a tricky business. Although men can use gifts to enhance their chances of getting laid, this can also leave them vulnerable to "gold-diggers" (a highly scientific term that describes women who use the promise of sex to get stuff from men, sometimes without actually putting out). So what kind of present can a guy give to improve his chances of getting laid while at the same time avoiding gold-diggers? More »
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What are you going to wear to the disco in the hollowed-out asteroid at the top of the space elevator? It's going to be awesome because on Saturday nights they play weird old music from the 1970s. When you get to Club Counterweight, surely you'll want be wearing this helpful chart on your t-shirt - or possibly one of these other fine tees. More »
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Pi is perhaps the most beloved number in the world. People devote an entire day to celebrating it; enthusiasts memorize it to hundreds of thousands of places; and it's even pretty useful for calculating the properties of circles and spheres. But pi hides some very important mathematical truths. Put another way, pi is just wrong. So wrong that physicist Michael Hartl says it's time to lose pi in favor of a new symbol: tau. We asked him to explain why pi has to go. More »
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