[ The 2/18 edition of Wild About Math bloggers! is at Equalis. ]
Welcome to Wild About Math Bloggers!
Carnival of Mathematics # 74 - The Tungsten Edition - has been published at Walking Randomly. One link of particular interest was A cute result relating to sums of cubes. This article shows a great generalization of the formula: 1^3 + 2^3 + 3^3 + ... + n^3 = (1 + 2 + 3 + ... + n)^2. Be sure to read the comments to make the connection between the well-known result and the generalization.
March 1 is World Maths Day. What is World Maths Day? How does it work? When is the registration deadline? Denise at Let's Play Math tells all.
God Plays Dice has a nice article, Pixar Mathematics.
Pixar's use of harmonic functions (by David Austin) describes mathematical techniques used by Pixar. Incidentally, apparently there exists something called Pixar University, which I learned when I went to the excellent Pixar exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California. As far as I can tell they are not hiring, they're really an internal training program, and anyway I don't know anything about animation. (The exhibit's next stop is in Hong Kong.
Here's a video that illustrates the use of harmonic functions:
[ The latest Wild About Math bloggers! is at Equalis. Here is last week's edition. ]
Welcome to February!
Speaking of February, Alex Bellos has a fun article about February, leap years, different calendar systems, the golden ratio and the golden string.
Science News explores the science of bike-sharing.
While the idea [bike-sharing] is gaining speed and subscribers at the 400 locations around the world where it has been implemented, there have been growing pains -- partly because the projects have been so successful. About seven percent of the time, users aren't able to return a bike because the station at their journey's destination is full. And sometimes stations experience bike shortages, causing frustration with the system.
James Tanton has a great new YouTube video exploration: A Leap-Frog Puzzle using Vectors (Tanton: Mathematics):
Choose any three points A, B and C in the plane. Starting anywhere you like on the page, "leapfrog" over the point A to land on the other side of A the same distance from it as you started. Now leapfrog over B, and then C, and then A again, and then B again and finally C again. Something astounding happens!
[ The current edition is at Equalis. ]
Here's the end-of-January edition of Wild About Math Bloggers! Enjoy.
Math Teachers at Play Carnival #34 is up at Math4allages.
One post in the Carnival that particularly got my attention was by John Cook telling us about an amazing lightning computing calendar produced by Ron D and available at the Dead Reckonings blog. It's free as a PDF download or you can buy a printed copy at Lulu.
Jon McLoone has a really fun article on using Mathematica for cracking ciphers using frequency analysis techniques.
NPR has an interview with Keith Devlin, the Math Guy, about a fun new book for kids on factoring integers into primes.
The book is based on this great poster.