After writing about some well known people with degrees in mathematics, I was moved to re-listen to some old Tom Lehrer songs on YouTube. I decided I’d post some links to his more mathematical songs here. Enjoy. First, “Lobachevsky,” a song about the Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky and his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, which some…
More prime phone numbers
Recently I noticed that Jenny’s phone number 8675309 (867-5309) had some interesting number theoretic properties. So, this evening I decided to punch my own phone number into Wolfram|Alpha to see what I’d find. Amazingly, both my 7-digit phone number and my full 10-digit phone number are prime numbers! That’s so excellent. (Unfortunately, putting a 1…
Look who majored in mathematics
Here are some people who studied mathematics, but are more well known for other things. Ralph Abernathy ~ civil rights leader and close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., was a mathematics professor at Alabama State University Corazon Aquino ~ former president of the Philippines, was a mathematics major at the College of Mt. St….
A wiki about blogs
I just added my blog to the Mathematics/Statistics page of the Academic Blog Portal. As the name implies, this is a resource for gathering together links to academic blogs. The FAQ gives the purpose of the blog: This is a portal that is intended to provide resources for (a) academic bloggers, and (b) people who want…
The 56th Carnival of Mathematics is now online
Head over to Reasonable Deviations to see the 56th Carnival of Mathematics. I’d also like to point out a post by Terrence Tao on mathematical research and the internet. He has a link there to an interesting talk (5mb pdf file) that he is going to give on this subject.
More on twin primes and Pythagorean triples
Pat B. wrote a response to my last post on the number 867-5309. In that post I pointed out that: 8675309 is a prime. 8675309 is a twin prime (8675311 is also prime). 8675309 is the hypotenuse of a (primitive) Pythagorean triple: 86753092 = 24602602+83191412. Pat asked: What is the smallest number that would meet…
867-5309; more than Jenny’s phone number
A few days ago I posted a video about the twin prime conjecture, which states that there are infinitely many primes that are two integers apart: 3 and 5, 5 and 7, 11 and 13, 101 and 103, 1607 and 1609… Well, check this out. Type 8675309 into WolframAlpha and it says: “Jenny’s phone number.”…
Applets for multivariable calculus
When I was in Portland a few weeks ago for MathFest 2009 I attended the minicourse Creating Demonstrations and Guided Explorations for Multivariable Calculus using CalcPlot3D by Paul Seeburger. Paul has created some applets to be used in calculus classes (mostly, but not exclusively, multivariable calculus). They can be found on his Exploring Multivariable Calculus…
A musical lecture on the twin prime conjecture
Just for fun, a musical description of the twin prime conjecture from NOVA ScienceNOW.
What is a howicide?
I’m a huge fan of HBO’s series The Wire. Today, while I was watching the 4th episode of season 4, I saw a curious word on the strap hanging around Sgt. Landsman’s neck: HOWICIDE. At first I thought this was a mistake or an easter egg. Why would they misspell homicide? But then I quickly…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 