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Geometry Installation by Hybycozo and Truncation

Posted on by yana_import

I was fortunate enough to visit downtown Los Angeles just in time to see this beautiful geometry installation by Hybycozo at the City National Plaza. The purple object on the left is an icosahedron, and the green one on the right — a truncated octahedron. The icosahedron is one of the 5 Platonic solids discovered several thousand years ago. Here is a picture of the Platonic solids from Johannes Kepler’s work,  Harmonices Mundi, in 1619:…
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Here’s an idea: start a Math Club at your school!

Posted on by yana_import

Parents often ask me advice on how to expose their children to math concepts outside of what is being taught in schools. Some feel like their children are ready for an extra challenge, while others would like to spark and foster their children’s interest in math….
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Gift wrap and symmetry

Posted on by yana_import

This is a time of year when many of us are running around frantically shopping for gifts. Caught up in the spirit of the holidays, I was looking for some math-themed gift wrap as part of a holiday promotion for Geometiles.  In the middle of all the madness, this winter holiday giftwrap caught my eye because of its rotational symmetry. To most people “symmetry” means “mirror symmetry”. But to mathematicians, mirror symmetry is just one of the four types of symmetry used to classify patterns. The other three types of symmetry are rotational, translational, and glide reflection….
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Bagels, pretzels… cubical frames?

Posted on by yana_import

This year’s Nobel Prize in physics brought into the limelight the subject of topology, which studies the property of figures that remain unchanged under stretching and twisting, as long as there is no tearing. As a member of the Nobel Prize committee explained in this article, a topologist is concerned with distinguishing a Swedish pretzel from a bagel not due to their taste differences, but due to the fact that a pretzel has two holes and a bagel has one. To a topologist, the pretzel is a surface of genus 2, and a bagel is a surface of genus 1, where the genus number simply corresponds to a number of holes….
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