Linkage

Recently read: Robert Bosch’s Opt Art: From Mathematical Optimization to Visual Design, as reviewed in The Math Less Traveled (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Some others that are less mathematical: Susan Phillips The City Beneath (the rare book about graffiti where the words are more interesting than the photos); Kelly & Zach Weinersmith’s Soonish; Spectrum 26: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art.

I’m sad that Cambridge Zero is not a name for the convention that, in writing a decimal number between 0 and 1, the leading 1’s digit is included (e.g. 0.618034, not .618034). (\(\mathbb{M}\).)

John Wallis and the Roof of the Sheldonian Theatre (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). It’s an elegant way to build a wide roof out of short beams with no joinery. But the history is somewhat lacking: Similar structures were known much earlier to Leonardo Da Vinci, Villard de Honnecourt, and Sebastiano Serlio. See Sylvie Duvernoy, “An introduction to Leonardo’s lattices”.

The 100 worst ed-tech debacles of the decade (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Rhapsody in Blue (1924) just reached the public domain, showing the insanity of U.S. copyright law (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Geometric collages by Augustine Kofie (\(\mathbb{M}\)). More at the artist’s web site.

How few \(k\)-gons can make a polyhedron, for different choices of \(k\)? (\(\mathbb{M}\), via, via.) The answers include an amazing high-genus polyhedron with 12 faces, each of which is an 11-gon, posted Nov 2018 by Ivan Neretin (sadly, with multiple adjacencies for some pairs of faces, dubious by some definitions of polyhedra, rather than having one edge per face pair).

Information about ACM’s opposition to mandatory open access of publicly-funded research (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

Russian Academy of Science cleans house (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). Their investigation finds 2528 plagiarized papers in 541 Russian-language journals, gets roughly 1/3 of them retracted, and threatens uncooperative journals with de-listing from their indexes. They also recommended blackballing 56 candidates for academy membership over plagiarism and other misbehavior.

The New York subway system thinks it has copyright on any stylized geometric map of its system and is sending takedown notices to the artist of the unofficial map used by Wikipedia (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). As the article clearly explains, none of the underlying data of the map, the approximate geographic locations of its stations, or the idea of geometric stylization are copyrightable.

Paris Musées releases 100,000 images of artworks for unrestricted public use (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

How simple math can cover even the most complex holes (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Quanta on covering all diameter-one shapes with the smallest possible convex region

MIP*=RE or, less technically, “two entangled provers could convince a polynomial-time verifier than an arbitrary Turing machine halts” (\(\mathbb{M}\), see also, see also). This appears to be a major breakthrough in quantum complexity and its applications in von Neumann algebra. See also some background from an author.

Computational Geometry Media Exposition coming in Zurich in late June (\(\mathbb{M}\)). It’s one of the events associated with the annual Symposium on Computational Geometry, and was formerly called the video review of computational geometry. This year it’s expanding to a much wider range of media. Submission deadline February 21; see link for details.