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…
Category: Humor
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.”…
Delicious pie chart
An accurate pie chart: [Image by Laszlo Thoth under a Creative Commons license]
Ambigram: pie≠3.14
I thought the first comment on this article was funny. It says that pie and 3.14 are mirror images, if written in a certain way. Regular readers may recall that I had fun creating ambigrams a few months ago. This blog comment inspired me to whip up a quick ambigram exhibiting this symmetry. I like…
Keith Devlin totally looks like Graham Nash
I was watching (and loving) the PBS American Masters documentary on Neil Young last night. There were several interview snippets with Graham Nash. Every time he came on he reminded me of Keith Devlin (NPR’s “The Math Guy”). They look similar, are both British, are about the same age, and both want to teach our…
Short talks at conferences
I just received an email from the MAA regarding MathFest 2009 that made me laugh. I’m scheduled to give a ten minute (10 minute!) talk in one of the sessions. Those of you who’ve given a 10 minute talk know that it is impossible to say anything in that amount of time. (This reminds me…
The NSF totally looks like the UAW
Here’s one for those of you who are fans of the website Totally Looks Like. The last time I was in Detroit I noticed that the emblem for the National Science Foundation totally looks like the emblem for the United Auto Workers.
Recommended readings (4/27/09)
Barack Obama speaks to the 146th Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Sciences Calculus Made Easy: Being A Very Simplest Introduction To Those Beautiful Methods Of Reckoning Which Are Generally Called By The Terrifying Names Of The Differential Calculus And The Integral Calculus (2nd Ed., 1914), by Silvanus P. Thompson ~ What one fool…
xkcd in the New York Times
The popular web comic xkcd is coming out in book form. The book will contain 150-200 of the 500 comics and will be sold on the xkcd website (initially, at least). There is an article about the book in the New York Times. Regular readers love the extra joke that appears on a mouse-over. The…
Arthur Benjamin: Lightning Calculation and Other “Mathemagic”
I’m continuing to enjoy watching mathematics videos online. This week I saw a few math-related TED talks pop up in my news reader and enjoyed watching them: Math = Letting Dead People Do the Work at Let’s Play Math How calculus is changing architecture at Casting Out Nines In case you do not know what…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 