By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Continuing last week’s theme of mathematical coffee tables, here is one designed by Michael Serra, inspired by the work of Piet Hein. The base consists of six pieces from a set of Hein’s SOMA puzzle, so the remaining two pieces are available as end tables. The glass […]
I can’t tell you how much it warms my editor’s heart to see readers trying their hands at the projects we publish and reporting the results back to us. Charlotte DeKoning saw our recent Math Monday column on making mathematical constructions with office supplies and decided to accept the challenge of building a snub dodecahedron […]
Vi Hart melts my mind again with a totally fun video explanation of binary counting with dancing hands and groovy music. The amount of intelligence, creativity, sense of humor, and the sheer joy of exploring ideas is downright dizzying. She makes it all look effortless. Vi Hart for Secretary of Education! As we’ve pointed out […]
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics If you make a coffee table that express a mathematical idea and place it right in the middle of your living room, that certainly makes a statement to all who visit that math is central in your life. This looks like an ordinary square coffee table, but […]
We’ve covered the work of the amazing Vi Hart before (Vi is also the daughter of our Math Monday columnist George Hart). Vi describes herself as a “recreational mathemusician” and she can certainly jam on math doodles with all of the chops of a bebop jazz musician. Vi also makes music-music, and has some cool […]
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Speaking of office supplies, a box of mailing tubes showed up in our Museum of Mathematics office and I couldn’t resist making a geometric construction. All you need to make your own copy are thirty tubes and sixty rubber bands. All the tubes are surrounded similarly. Each […]
By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics Pipe cleaners are easily woven into flat lattice patterns, but spherical weaves are more challenging. Here is a good exercise in spherical thinking that is much harder than it looks. The thirty pipe cleaners each have the same shape and the same relationship to their neighbors. The […]
