Science Art: Magpie on the Gallows, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1568
Oh, a beautiful Renaissance landscape by one of those Lowland masters, a naturalistic scene of people meeting merrily on a wooded path between the village […]
mathematics
Science Art: Plate VI from Here, a number of broken gifts for the carpenters and lovers…., by Lorenz Stöer, 1567.
I’ve posted illustrations from this remarkable book of geometric studies before. This one looks, to this old gamer’s eyes, like 1D4+1D20+1. (For non-gamers: It’s the […]
Science Art: In s is das Centrum fur den Meridian ANQ, 1857
Click to embiggen As described on Wikimedia Commons (who got this diagram from the British Library), the image was “taken from page 100 of ‘Grundzüge […]
Science Art: From Here, a number of broken gifts for the carpenters and lovers…., by Lorenz Stöer, 1567.
Click to embiggen The title here is the best I could render from the middle German “Hier Inn etliche zerbrochne Gebew, den Schreinern in eingelegter […]
SONG: “Math” (a penitential cover)
SONG: “Math” [Download] (a penitential cover) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: This has no scientific source; it’s a penitential cover for being late for March’s song (which […]
There’s an easy fix for gerrymandering, if Congress can count two decimal places.
In Forbes, Johns Hopkins Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics Steven Salzberg has put forward a modest mathematical proposal to solve some of […]
We’re getting bigger: “It will be harder to feed 9 billion people in 2050 than it would be today.”
Gemini Research News has some bad news for the Earth’s growing population. It turns out that our farms will face some trouble because we’re going […]
Statistics are complicated, right? Well, thinking that is why we tend to get misled.
Ars Technica keeps it simple, smart, with a new study that shows why statistics can be the third kind of lie* – sometimes the hard […]
Alan Turing’s idea makes water three times cleaner.
Nature reports on a water filter based on computer pioneer Alan Turing’s only biology paper that appears to clean salt out of water three times […]
Science Art: Representations of the Braid Groups by Nancy Scherich, overall winner, Dance Your Ph.D. 2017.
“A representation is faithful if it has only one braid in its kernel.” So, this is doctorate-level mathematics rendered as interpretative dance, and that is […]
Science Art: Belt Trick by Jason Hise
The belts always twist, but never get tangled. Geometry can be weird. If you find this hypnotic, check out what the same creator has done […]
Why are American kids getting so good at higher math?
The Atlantic investigates the social movement behind America’s recent surprise win at the international Math Olympiad: You wouldn’t see it in most classrooms, you wouldn’t […]
Science Art: Contour plot of Rastrigin’s function in two variables, by Tos
Click to embiggen I don’t have the math language to explain what’s going on here very well. It’s a diagram of the Rastrigin function, which […]
Beyond “We can all agree on cheese”: Higher pizza-cutting mathematics.
New Scientist delves into the advanced mapping of pizza slicing for *everyone’s* preferences: Most of us divide a pizza using straight cuts that all meet […]
The third kind of lie: science vs. p-hacking.
Fusion goes beyond the three kinds of lies (“Lies, damned lies, and statistics,” according to… someone) and into the awful implications of trusting the data […]