Year-end linkage

Nature’s choice of the best science images of 2022 (\(\mathbb{M}\), via).

Architectures of Weaving: From Fibers and Yarns to Scaffolds and Skins (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Newly published edited volume that “bridges architecture and textile by exploring fiber architectures from the micro scale of biological systems to the macro scale of textile and built structures”.

This image shows the triaugmented triangular prism (\(\mathbb{M}\), previously), another new Wikipedia Good Article. Yes, it’s just one of many irregular polyhedra. But it comes up in many contexts: It is dual to the associahedron, one of only eight convex deltahedra, and one of six positively-curved Whitney triangulations. It gives a small counterexample to Kempe’s false 4-color proof. And its vertices form minimum-energy nine-point configurations on a sphere, for various definitions of energy.

Festive holiday Mexican cactuses photographed by Orgullo Wixarika (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

The Knuth Prize committee (of which I am a member) is seeking nominations for the 2023 prize (\(\mathbb{M}\)), jointly given annually by ACM SIGACT and IEEE TCMF to an individual with “a sustained record of high-impact, seminal contributions to the foundations of computer science”. Anyone in the Theoretical Computer Science community may make a nomination. Nomination deadline February 15.

Knight’s tours by Lelio and Petronio Della Volpe from 1766, far from the earliest work on knight’s tours but possibly the first to depict them graphically.

You probably already knew to do this, but: Even the FBI says you should use an ad blocker (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). Why? Because of too many malicious ads that impersonate legitimate brands and trick people into installing malware or revealing their login credentials. See also the original FBI announcement.

Puzzle game of building convex shapes on a triangular grid (\(\mathbb{M}\)), by Jacob Siehler. At least 12 are possible. But there are some hidden constraints on the edge slopes and lengths that prevent some convex shapes with the correct area from being formed.

Bisymmetric hendecahedra, space-filling polyhedra formed as the Voronoi cells of points in alternating layers of snub square tilings.

The YouTube computational geometry channel (\(\mathbb{M}\)) has videos for many interesting research talks.

The topologist’s world map (\(\mathbb{M}\), via). If you could redraw all the world’s countries as nice aesthetic shapes, respecting only their patterns of connectivity but not their areas or other numerical attributes, what might it look like? This post has one possible answer, a nice packing into a disk reminiscant of the ancient T-O maps but, unlike them, also including the Americas.

Despite right-wing tantrums about “woke cancellation”, it is the anti-woke Russians who are currently making news for violating academic freedom (\(\mathbb{M}\)):

• Logos, a leading Russian humanities journal, retracted a paper on lesbian fashion as “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations”

• The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration fired activist professor Yulia Galyamina (who is Russian) as a “foreign agent”

For computer science, this study found the impact factor of a journal to be negatively correlated with expert assessments of the quality of its articles (\(\mathbb{M}\)). The correlation appears to be very close to zero, though, so I think the more accurate conclusion is that impact factor of journals is close to meaningless for this field, likely at least in part because journals are not the main high-prestige publication venue.

The sacred geometry of electronics (photo of a rotary encoder).

Elicia White takes a folded paper wave to the beach to visit its natural cousin.