Though most people in this world never want to think about math after high school, let’s talk about its symbols. Where and when did the symbols for addition and subtraction get invented? We don’t even question them when we see them now. But what the heck did people use before that? More »
When an amateur mathematician from Indiana managed to solve one of mathematics’ great problems—squaring the circle—he decided to copyright his proof, but allow his home state to use it for free. Sadly, things didn’t quite go to plan. More »
The new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition isn’t the first color-screen graphing calculator. It isn’t even TI’s first color graphing calculator, a distinction claimed by the TI-Nspire CX and its sibling the TI-Nspire CX CAS. However, the TI-84+CSE, as we’re abbreviating it, is a major milestone in the 17-year-old TI-83 and TI-84 Plus family of calculators. Although it retains the look and feel of the TI-84 Plus operating system, and keeps the familiar case shape and key layout, the outstanding feature of the TI-84+CSE is a bright, glossy color LCD screen. No longer will math and programs need to squeeze into 96 by 64 monochrome pixels; the new screen is 320×240 and can display 65,000 different colors. More »
Pi is famously calculated to trillions of digits—but how many of them do we really, really need? This video demonstrates that, actually, just 39 will do. More »
When Phillip Bump heard about the recently discovered 17-million-digit prime number—the world’s biggest!—he decided to celebrate. So he took it and, six digits at a time, converted it into RGB. The result is strangely compelling. [Phillip Bump via Boing Boing] More »
There are billions of people on the planet, but what are the chances you’ll fall in love with one of them? This video explores the possibility using a couple of equations, and it might soften your shriveled black heart just a little bit. More »
When you listen to music, when its waves of sound collide with your ear, you don’t hear a wall of sound. A great deal of information might travel in a sound wave and, if that sound wave were actually a giant wave of water rushing onto a beach, you might expect to feel it as a big shove like any other big wave of water coming in from the ocean. Except that’s not what happens when this particular wave hits you. Standing there ankle deep in the surf, you brace for it to crash against your body, but when it does arrive, it’s not a “hit” at all. Instead, you feel a hundred different things at once, all on different parts of your body. Some places it’s a cool brushing, others it soft slap or the feeling of a light sunburn. And then the wave is passed. More »
Give infinite monkeys infinite typewriters and over an infinite timeline, they’ll come up with Hamlet. You know the thought experiment. But apply the same concept to brute forcing every possible photograph, pixel by pixel, and the idea becomes just slightly less ludicrous. Non-ludicrous enough that artist Jeffrey Thompson is actually giving it a try, though on a (relatively) smaller scale. More »
The world’s largest prime number just got much, much bigger. Say hello to 257,885,161-1, a prime number that is over 17 million characters long when written out in full—enough to fill 13,000 pages of A4 paper. More »
If you’ve ever read the Jurassic Park novel and wondered what those crazy sets of spirals were between chapters, you need to watch this video. Also: if you’ve never read the Jurassic Park novel, you need to watch this video. More »
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