American Honda paid for a viral marketing campaign in Lancaster, CA for the Honda Civic. They cut grooves in the road so that when a car drives over the road at 55 mph (in a Honda Civic, presumably), it will play Rossini’s William Tell Overture (yes, that’s the Lone Ranger theme song). The “debut” of…
Folding a golden rectangle
Recently I wrote about the mathematics of cutting and folding paper and about the golden ratio, . Here’s a video that brings these two ideas together. We see how to create a golden rectangle (a rectangle for which the ratio of the sides is ) by folding a piece of paper. [via Anthony Brand’s maths…
Fractals on NOVA
I was shocked yesterday afternoon. I turned on the television to see what was on for my kids (PBS, of course) only to see, not Bob the Builder or Word World, but the Cantor set being constructed right before my eyes. It turned out that it was a new NOVA special called Hunting the Hidden…
Knuth stops writing checks
For years Donald Knuth would write checks for $2.56 (one hexidecimal dollar) to anyone who found an error in one of his books. Needless to say, most of these checks went uncashed. Unfortunately, he has decided to stop writing these checks. On his website he writes: due to an unfixable security flaw in the way…
Princeton University Press blog
A few days ago I discovered that Princeton University Press, publisher of my book, has created a blog. I’ve been enjoying reading the posts and watching/listening to the media, such as my editor Vickie Kearn’s interview of Andrew Gelman, who asks “What’s the matter with Connecticut?”
Job opening: Lucasian Chair of Mathematics
There is going to be a new faculty member in the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University. The current Lucasian Chair, Stephen Hawking, is turning 67 on January 8, 2009, and will reach the manditory retirement age. The chair was founded in 1663. Past holders of the chair are: 1664 Isaac Barrow 1669 Sir…
Calculus in politics
In his October 1996 editorial in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, “Mathematics Is an Edifice, Not a Toolbox,” Hugo Rossi wrote: In the fall of 1972 President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his…
Advice for the budding mathematician of any age
Fields Medal winner Terry Tao put together a page on his blog titled Career Advice. He writes: Here is my collection of various pieces of advice on academic career issues in mathematics, roughly arranged by the stage of career at which the advice is most pertinent (though of course some of the advice pertains to…
E-Z Pass, speeding tickets, and the mean value theorem
On Monday I gave a lecture on the mean value theorem in my Calculus I class. The mean value theorem says that if is a differentiable function and , then there exists a value such that . That is, the average rate of change of the function over must be achieved (as an instantaneous rate…
David Foster Wallace’s commencement address
Here is a commencement address given by the late David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005. It was recently reprinted in the Wall Street Journal. It is both inspirational and melancholy, especially after David Foster Wallace’s apparent death by suicide. He says: Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 