Column

  1. Math

    Dogs Catching Frisbees

    When navigating to intercept a thrown Frisbee, dogs appear to use the same geometric strategy that a baseball fielder employs to snag a fly ball hit into the outfield.

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  2. Math

    Earth Hole

    What path would an object falling down a hole through Earth follow?

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  3. Math

    Groups, Graphs, and Erdös Numbers

    Erdös numbers reveal the great extent of mathematical collaboration.

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  4. Math

    Priming Upward

    A singular effort has turned up what is now the largest known prime number.

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  5. Math

    Playing Pig, Optimally

    The simple dice game Pig is surprisingly complex when you're trying to find an optimal strategy for playing it.

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  6. Math

    A Measure of Beauty

    In the 1930s, mathematician G.D. Birkhoff proposed a formula for computing aesthetic value.

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  7. Math

    Extra Time, Math, and the SAT

    Extra time on the math portion of the SAT helps the most able students the most.

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  8. Math

    Extra Time, Math, and the SAT

    Extra time on the math portion of the SAT helps the most able students the most.

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  9. Math

    Counting on Fibonacci

    Fibonacci numbers and their relationships can be visualized in terms of tilings.

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  10. Math

    Progressive Primes

    Prime numbers have all sorts of remarkable and mysterious properties. Evenly divisible only by themselves and 1, primes can’t be written as the product of smaller positive integers. There are infinitely many of them, and they appear to be scattered somewhat haphazardly among the whole numbers. It’s not yet known if there are infinitely many […]

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  11. Math

    Anatomy of a Bead Creature

    Beadwork offers a novel view of hyperbolic geometry.

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  12. Math

    From Number Puzzles to Automata

    A high school student plays with numbers and does an award-winning project elucidating the link between automata and divisibility.

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