Programmer Dimitry Tishchenko builds geometric sculptures with supermagnets. Like, lots and lots of them. The eighty thumbnails on this page represent only about 10% of the shots in his frankly amazing Flickr set. [via Neatorama]
A month ago, I blogged about Ron Doerfler’s beautiful Age of Graphical Computing calendar for 2010, lamenting the fact that it’d only appeared on my radar at the end of the year. Well, I’ve been keeping an eye peeled, and Ron just released his 2011 calendar. It’s not about graphical computing, but about what is perhaps an equally interesting mathematical curiosity: Techniques for doing fast mental math. And it looks to be just as beautiful.
calculus-book-cover.jpgMy buddy Trent Johnson, who works for AMD here in Austin, made this beautiful object. I was standing awkwardly in the corner at his birthday party last weekend, trying to remember how to interact with flesh-and-blood people on a face-to-face basis, when I looked down and saw it leaning against the wall next to me. And I immediately recognized it from the cover of my college calculus text, from the flyleaf of which I now quote:
Apart from the fact that the bricks and plates are open at their bottoms, and so the pieces always have one side that can’t be “smooth,” Lego is a pretty handy way to prototype interlocking solid puzzles. Many of these are based on cubic units, and can be built in Lego at a scale of 1 cube = 2 studs x 2 studs x 5 plates.
Eric Harshbarger, whose Lego hijinks we’ve featured a couple times before, has produced some lovely models based on this principle. Shown above are his 6-piece burr, checkered solid pentominoes, Soma cube, and deluxe polycube set. The awesomeness continues at Eric’s site.
Ron Doerfler of Rolling Meadows, IL is an engineer for Northrop-Grumman. He’s written a book on advanced mentat techniques and keeps a fascinating blog called Dead Reckonings: Lost Art in the Mathematical Sciences:
Part of this problem, posed by one Ernst Straus in 1952, is to design a polygonal room lined with mirrors having at least two points such that any ray starting at one point can reflect around the room forever without hitting the other point, and vice versa. One such room, shown above, was demonstrated by […]
