For the Museum of Mathematics And here is yet another installment in our epic Math Mondays series on the intricate world of mechanical linkages. See the Linkages series introduction for the MoMath Linkage Kit, an introduction, and general instructions. OK, the suspense surrounding the (non?)existence of a straight-line linkage has built long enough. Let’s cut […]
People give all manner of toys as gifts during the holidays. Some are big hits, others flop. I think the best ones are fun and stimulating while at the same time teaching a skill or concept. In that spirit, here are some toys that fall under the broad umbrella of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math).
If you recall, in the last installment before we took a breather, Math Mondays posed a question/challenge: Is there a four bar linkage that produces precisely straight motion? How about a linkage?
Imagine a regular tetrahedron. Mark the midpoint of one edge and draw straight lines to the vertices opposite that edge on the two faces incident to that edge. In your mental image, transmogrify that edge and those two lines into zippers and unzip them. What do you get? Believe it or not, a standard American-size business card.
Mathemusician Vi Hart, never one to rest on convention, decides that “linear bird stuffing,” a la the turkducken, is not very inspired and sets herself the task of creating a more fractal-friendly “turduckenen-duckenen” (or, um something like that).
Today’s column is devoted to truncated icosahedron constructions and the nerds who love.
For the Museum of Mathematics I have been remiss. I wrote an entire column on arrangements of great circles without once mentioning Buckminster Fuller. His original designs for domes involved bracing them solely with arcs of great circles. Since, on the surface of a sphere a great circle is the shortest path, or geodesic, between […]
