This was the 5th time that the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) hosted its annual math festival. Last year, the festival was held at 28 Liberty where everyone was having a blast at the Geometiles table. As I was starting to make plans to bring Geometiles to Manhattan this year, the pandemic struck. Not to…
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Category: Math Club
Lefty or righty? A few words about chirality
Do you see anything unusual about this picture? These two boys are identical twins; but not just any twins: they are mirror twins! That means that many of their features are mirror images of each other. What you can’t see in the picture is that one of the boys is a left-handed and the other…
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Calculus in a Chair
What can a chair teach us about integral calculus? Quite a bit, if you have right chair. British designer Julian Mayor made just such a chair: Mr. Mayor reckons the chair is much more comfortable than it looks; Igor (pictured sitting) certainly seems happy. Regardless of Igor’s comfort, the chair is a great illustration of what we mean…
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Archimedes’ Earring
To be perfectly honest, I have no idea whether Archimedes wore earrings. However, I couldn’t help but think of him when I saw the posts on Kumiko’s earrings: If you look closely, you will see that the post is a cuboctahedron, which is one of the Archimedean solids. A cuboctahedron is roughly what you get…
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