Category Archives: Mathematics

This academic year has been thrilling: first nuclear fusion breakeven, now an ein Stein! Last week, a preprint at arxiv.org by David Smith et al. announced an “ein Stein”, or one stone, a shape that forces a non periodic tiling … Continue reading →

On 1852 October 23, Francis Guthrie noticed that he needed only 4 colors to color the counties of England so no two bordering counties shared the same color. This works for any map, but only in 1976, and with the aid of … Continue reading →

Slide rules were the analog computers that ruled science and engineering for 400 years. Their brilliant innovation was using logarithms to convert multiplication and division to addition and subtraction, and Slide rules feature logarithmic scales that slide past each other. … Continue reading →

In four dimensions, you can’t tie your shoelaces — because 4D knots don’t work. Any 1D curve in 4D space can be continuously deformed to the unit circle, which is an unknot. The looping animation below demonstrates how to undo a … Continue reading →

Marvelously, the square of the sum of natural numbers is the sum of their cubes! Equivalently, the sum of their cubes is the square of their sum. This mathematical gem is attributed to Nicomachus of Gerasa who lived almost 2000 years … Continue reading →

A complex function that is its own derivative normalized to one at zero implicitly defines the famous Archimedean and Euler constants of circular motion and exponential growth. Even in a world of strong gravity, where the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its … Continue reading →