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Science News
May 5, 2001
Ivars Peterson |
Lava Lamp Randomness Invented in 1963, a decorative fixture in many homes during the 1970s, and still in production, Lava Lite lamps are now the object of renewed curiosity. Indeed, researchers have come up with a novel application of the mesmerizing movements of the lamp's globules, as randomization seeds...   |
Science News
April 21, 2001
Ivars Peterson |
Temple Circles One tradition that flourished 200 years ago in Japan, during its period of isolation from the western world, involved Euclidean geometry. Scholars and others would inscribe geometric problems on wooden tablets, then hang the tablets under the eaves of shrines as offerings... |
Science News
April 7, 2001
Ivars Peterson |
Strange Orbits Like toy cars chasing each other on a looped racetrack, three stars can, in principle, trace out a figure-eight orbit in space... |
Science News
March 31, 2001
Ivars Peterson |
Prized Geometric Logic For a given poset (often expressed as a Hasse diagram), it's possible to construct a geometric object that encodes the same relationships among the elements as the poset itself... |
Science News
March 24, 2001
Ivars Peterson |
Buses on Quantum Schedules Anyone who has waited for a bus in the city has probably casually observed that, after an inordinately long wait, two or three buses often come along at the same time. The question of why such bunching seems to happen has prompted all sorts of speculation... |
Science News
March 17, 2001 |
Subtle Logic, Winning Game So-called Ehrenfeucht games have proved particularly useful for tackling certain aspects of mathematical logic. |
Science News
March 3, 2001
Ivars Peterson |
Quirky Video Poker The lure of easy money brings gullible bettors back again and again to the game of video poker---an immensely popular pastime in casinos and other gambling venues throughout the United States. Recent mathematical studies have confirmed that most players are bound to lose money... |
Science News
February 24, 2001
Ivars Peterson |
Appealing Numbers It's amazing how much effort has gone into tracking down amicable numbers, which have practically no application in mathematics. They have a curious appeal that has endured for millennia... |
Science News
February 17, 2001 |
Immersed in Klein Bottles A description of the "Klein bottle", a mathematical construction that has zero volume, and the story of a company which makes them. |
Science News
February 10, 2001
Ivars Peterson |
White Narcissus Alhough sculptor Robert Longhurst's abstract sculptures bear an uncanny resemblance to mathematical forms known as minimal surfaces, they emerge from Longhurst's imagination rather than from mathematics... |
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