Linkage partly from Barbados

Hedra Zoo (\(\mathbb{M}\)), like the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, but for sequences of polyhedra rather than sequences of integers.

Mathematical 3d prints by Dan Piker: Morin’s surface, Boy’s surface, a Klein bottle, and a puzzle based on a 3d Pythagorean tiling.

Origami tessellation torus (\(\mathbb{M}\)), by Tomohiro Tachi.

Low crossing numbers (\(\mathbb{M}\)), blog post on a SoCG 21 paper by Mónika Csikós and Nabil H. Mustafa. Given points and a family of shapes containing subsets of them, the goal is to connect the points by a matching, path, or spanning tree so that no shape has its boundary crossed by many edges. Many geometric set families have these structures and this paper shows how to find it faster than was previously known.

Quoridor (\(\mathbb{M}\)), a game with simple abstract rules that lead to an interesting mix of strategy and tactics, in which you often have to balance the future effects of a move on your own progress versus its effects on your opponent.

Knotty analog oscilloscope art (\(\mathbb{M}\)), video by Henry Segerman with Matthias Goerner.

It’s not every day that I (and many other Mathstodon users) get mentioned in the New York Times (\(\mathbb{M}\))! The context is an article by Siobhan Roberts on partitioning rectangles into similar rectangles.

The list of accepted papers at SoCG’23 (\(\mathbb{M}\)), the 39th International Symposium on Computational Geometry, next June in Dallas, is now online. I have one in the list; I’ll post in more detail on it once I have a preprint version ready. One of my earlier posts is related and another post was a lemma that I ended up not using.

Beware the Runge spikes (\(\mathbb{M}\))! Matt Parker on the Runge phenomenon, in which interpolating through more data points can make the quality of interpolation worse. Sadly, no mention of the Witch of Agnesi.

Quanta on low-surface-area convex polytopes that tile high-dimensional space by integer translations (\(\mathbb{M}\)). Based on “An integer parallelotope with small surface area” by Assaf Naor and Oded Regev.

I just returned from a week-long workshop at the Bellairs Research Institute in Barbados, my first since the pandemic started (\(\mathbb{M}\)). This time, Bellairs double-booked us with another workshop, so we met in Seabourne House and its ocean-view garden instead of the usual picnic table area. This worked surprisingly well, especially for the morning sessions. The photo below shows some of this area; the full gallery has a few other shots of architectural details.

Three unit regular tetrahedra pack neatly into a unit cube (\(\mathbb{M}\)).

John Allen Paulos on writing popular mathematics (\(\mathbb{M}\)), and Bertrand Russell’s other paradox, on the impossibility of combining intelligibility and precision.

What can mathematicians do (\(\mathbb{M}\))? Recordings of ten talks by disabled mathematicians.

Scott Aaronson on the shortsightedness of xenophobia (\(\mathbb{M}\)), triggered by the denial of a visa to a would-have-been-incoming doctoral student from China.