My kids and I painted and carved pumpkins last night. And, yes, we made a pumpkin pi.
Category: Math
Circle squaring limerick
I found this nice limerick on Charles Petzold’s blog: Said the man about town, ‘I have a flair For squaring the circle, I swear.’ But he found that the strain Was too great for his brain, So he’s gone back to circling the square. Petzold has a scan of the title page of E. H….
Exceptional MathReviews
If you have access to MathSciNet and are in the mood for some good laughs, head over to Kimball Martin’s collection of Exceptional MathReviews. He introduces his collection as follows: Were you ever looking up papers in MathSciNet and you found one that especially made you smile or laugh? And were you ever wishing that MathReviews…
The hitchhiker’s guide to infinity
I’ve had a few encounters with large numbers and the infinite lately. First, I came across this interesting blog post that asks how many times you would have to fold a piece of paper so that its thickness would be the same as the distance from the earth to the moon. It is a really…
Musicians with PhD’s
Yesterday I saw this tweet on appear in my Twitter stream: @mergerecords NPR’s Science Friday talks to Dan Snaith about @caribouband and mathematics! http://www.sciencefriday.com/arts/2010/10/math-x-music-caribou/ It turns out that Dan Snaith, who is essentially the electronic band Caribou, has a PhD in mathematics. (According the math genealogy project he received a PhD in number theory in 2005, Kevin…
The transcendence of e (part 3)
This is the third part in a 3-part blog post in which we prove that is transcendental. Three-step proof that is transcendental Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Recall that in step 1 and step 2 we proved that for any prime sufficiently large and that is a nonzero integer. In this step we will…
The transcendence of e (part 2)
This is the second part in a 3-part blog post in which we prove that is transcendental. Three-step proof that is transcendental Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Recall that in step 1 we proved the following lemma. Lemma 1. Suppose is a root of the polynomial . Let be a polynomial and . Then…
The transcendence of e
A real number is called algebraic if it is the root of a polynomial with integer coefficients. Examples of algebraic numbers are (it is the root of ), (), the golden ratio (), and the single real root of the quintic polynomial (which cannot be expressed with radicals). A real number that is not algebraic…
Mathematics in Moby-Dick
Twice before I have posted mathematical passages that I have stumbled upon in works of literature. Yesterday I finished reading Moby-Dick (great book, great ending!), so I thought I’d highlight a few mathematical passages that it contains. Especially interesting to me is the second one in which Melville mentions the impossibility of squaring a circle….
Furstenberg’s topological proof of the infinitude of primes
I just returned from a 10-day trip to India. It was my first visit there. I gave a talk at the ICM Satellite Conference: Various Aspects of Dynamical Systems. The conference was hosted by the Department of Mathematics at the M. S. University, Baroda, which is in Vadodara (formerly Baroda) in the Indian state of…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 