Mathematics
Happy Pi Day!
In honor of Pi Day, 3/14/2009, I present the first 2009 digits of Pi:3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648...
March 14, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Dispatch from AAAS--Origami and Objects that Cannot Exist
This weekend, blog overseer Laura and I are writing from the AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago. The press briefing began with four scientists gazing upwards. This would normally be odd, but when the scientists are all experts in origami and the ceiling looks like folded paper, not so much. "We're just...
February 15, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Does Rugby Predict Pope's Doom?
As I was paging through a special Sport section in a December issue of the British Medical Journal (the source of Tuesday’s post on noisy golf clubs), two words caught my eye: papal rugby.Those words were part of a larger phrase (the special and general theories of papal rugby) that makes no more s...
January 08, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Why Is Minnesota's Recount Doomed?
My friend Charles Seife is a connoisseur of counterintuitive numbers problems. He wrote an op-ed for yesterday's New York Times about the recount in Minnesota, which seems like it ought to be a simple problem but isn't:Throw in the weirdo ballots with lizard people, stray marks and indecipherable d...
December 05, 2008 |
By Laura Helmuth
Primed for Success
Terence Tao is regarded as first among equals among young mathematicians, but who's counting
October 2007 |
By Dana Mackenzie
