Austin TX 2013/04/09 It probably is not possible to make it through contemporary middle and high school math without seeing M.C. Escher’s work. A genius, for sure, Escher created mind-bending art, stretching and twisting classic geometric shapes to fit his desires. A significant portion of Escher’s artwork was based on tessellations. A tessellation is a … Continue reading Miles of Tiles
Rue Lagrange Paris, France 2013/03/12 On the flight to Paris, while I should have been sleeping, I was thinking about math. (Not entirely unusual apart from being some 30,000 feet above the Atlantic.) France is kind of a big deal for math history. One of the Paris’ oldest churches, St-Germain-des-Prés, entombs a portion of Descartes.0 … Continue reading Lagrange Four Squares
Austin TX 2012/06/28 In December of 2009, I picked up a book by Steven Strogatz called The Calculus of Friendship.0 Reading the book, I found myself touched by the story of the author’s life-long relationship with his high school Calculus teacher, affectionately called Joff. They corresponded about interesting math problems for years as Strogatz went … Continue reading Sine Squared
Ecuador Guest chalker = Julie Friends of mine, Melissa, Orion, and Julie, traveled to Ecuador this summer. Melissa and her son, Orion, went south in June. In July, Julie was heading down to meet up with Melissa and Orion. She mentioned going to the Equator. First, rather dimly, I said something like, “The Equator runs … Continue reading Equatorial Distance
the triangle Austin, TX 2011/07/17 A couple of years ago, I wrote a little program about triangles. The program calculates the area of a triangle given the base and the height. No great feat, right? Except, I did a little something special with the user interface. The triangle is graphed in a good old Cartesian … Continue reading Triangles
Austin, TX 7/7/2011 For millennia, humans have loved to operate with mathematical objects. We started with shapes. We moved them around, flipped them over, and even “added” them, laying them side-to-side. Then, we went to town on numbers, and the town grew to a metropolis of operation neighborhoods: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponentiation. From … Continue reading Binomial Squared
W 4th St Station, NYC 5/29/2011 I had a lovely day with dear friends Marlowe, Yasmina, and their little ones, Elia and Aviva. Marlowe encouraged Laurie and me to go to Babbo for dinner. I had the mushroom sformato, squab, and panna cotta. It was delightfully delicious. The spirits of New York and Europe were alive … Continue reading Fibonacci Numbers
Madison Square Park, NYC5/28/2011 I was in NYC for a friend’s wedding. Big plans for the city: food, subway rides, Central Park, the Upper East Side, and chalk. On Saturday morning, I hopped a train to midtown and headed into Madison Square Park. The park had a large sculpture from Jaume Plensa. It stopped me … Continue reading Hexagons
Footpath Math: Chalk it up to a math geek 