Measure-theoretic probability: Why it should be learnt and how to get started. The
clickable chart of distribution relationships. Just two of the interesting and informative probability resources I've learned about, along with countless other tidbits of information, from statistician
John D. Cook's
blog and his probability fact-of-the-day Twitter feed
ProbFact. John also has daily tip and fact Twitter feeds for
Windows keyboard shortcuts,
regular expressions,
TeX and LaTeX,
algebra and number theory,
topology and geometry,
real and complex analysis, and beginning tomorrow,
computer science and
statistics.
posted by grouse
on Dec 5, 2010 -
17 comments
Let's say you're me and you're in math class, and you're supposed to be learning about factoring. Trouble is, your teacher is too busy trying to convince you that factoring is a useful skill for the average person to know with real-world applications ranging from passing your state exams all the way to getting a higher SAT score and unfortunately does not have the time to show you why factoring is actually interesting. It's perfectly reasonable for you to get bored in this situation. So like any reasonable person, you start doodling.
[more inside]
posted by ErWenn
on Dec 3, 2010 -
27 comments
When he was 32, his life seemed hopeless. He was bankrupt and without a job. He was grief stricken over the death of his first child and he had a wife and a newborn to support. Drinking heavily, he contemplated suicide. Instead, he decided decided that his life was not his to throw away: it belonged to the universe. Buckminster Fuller embarked on "an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity." If the architect, author, designer, inventor, and futurist
Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller were still alive, he would be 115 years old today. Though he died in 1983, his legacy grows on through
recordings of his ideas and
the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jul 12, 2010 -
32 comments
The eyeballing game: compare your best attempts at several instinctive everyday tasks - determining a point of convergence, bisecting an angle, finding the midpoint of a line - against mathematical certainty. In a more financial mood? Play
Chartgame: given a random historical stock chart of an unnamed S&P 500 company, choose to buy and sell as time advances to see if you can beat the market.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Oct 14, 2009 -
22 comments
Curtis Steiner is a Seattle businessman and artist who operates a local gift shop. Both his home and his shop have
garnered positive press, but his greatest artistic achievement may be his piece entitled
1,000 blocks, which explores the permutations of the six facets of the cube.
posted by Tube
on Dec 21, 2008 -
30 comments
The
Gömböc is the first known convex, homogeneous
shape having just one stable and one unstable point (i.e. altogether two points) of equilibrium. A little like some turtles' shells (or
weebles), it's
self-righting, but for purely geometric reasons.
[more inside]
posted by gleuschk
on Dec 9, 2007 -
35 comments
Did the roof of the Pantheon influence Copernicus? Are the planets of the solar system aligned in accordance with a nearly-forgotten hypothesis known (unfairly) as
Bode's Law? A fascinating wide-ranging discussion on BLDGBLOG with
Walter Murch, the visionary editor and sound designer for such films as
The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, THX1138, and many others. [Murch's film work has previously been discussed
here and
here.]
posted by digaman
on Apr 7, 2007 -
20 comments
The Spidron is an interesting geometric construction that seems to lend itself to folding, dissection, and space-filling in two and three dimensions.
posted by Wolfdog
on Jul 17, 2005 -
9 comments
The Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota, while now closed, maintains an awesome website with tons of math resources.
I like
sphere eversion, i.e. turning a sphere inside out. Link is to script of video, which explains things pretty well. Here is a
clip [QT]. Also good:
notes from a class on geometry and the imagination that John Conway and some friends gave awhile back. Old but good.
posted by mai
on Mar 1, 2005 -
3 comments
Euclid in Colour. 'An unusual and attractive edition of Euclid was published in 1847 in England, edited by an otherwise unknown mathematician named Oliver Byrne. It covers the first 6 books of Euclid, which range through most of elementary plane geometry and the theory of proportions. What distinguishes Byrne's edition is that he attempts to present Euclid's proofs in terms of pictures, using as little text - and in particular as few labels - as possible. What makes the book especially striking is his use of colour ... '
posted by plep
on Aug 11, 2004 -
15 comments
'The Poincare Conjecture' Solved? "Dr Grigori Perelman, of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, claims to have proved the Poincare Conjecture, one of the most famous problems in mathematics. The Poincare Conjecture, an idea about three-dimensional objects, has haunted mathematicians for nearly a century. If it has been solved, the consequences will reverberate throughout geometry and physics."
Also of note is that Perelman's solution is only a benign side effect of his efforts toward defining all three-dimensional surfaces mathematically, which if successful would allow humanity to "produce a catalogue of all possible three-dimensional shapes in the Universe, meaning that [mankind] could ultimately describe the actual shape of the cosmos itself."
posted by eyebeam
on May 8, 2003 -
13 comments
