What are the acoustics of breaking a bamboo chopstick? According to a new paper by physicist Tzay-Ming Hong and his colleagues at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, it’s kind of like the acoustics of breaking a bundle spaghetti: they both apparently resemble the Gutenberg–Richter scaling law, which relates earthquake magnitude to the frequency of earthquakes with at […]
Tag: geometry
Curious twists of boids
Willard discoursed about how certain snakes, including boids, coil around prey: “Constricting Methods of Snakes,” Daniel E. Willard, Copeia, 1977, vol. 1977(2), pp. 379-382. “Geometry limits to four the ways a snake can coil around its prey: venter toward the prey, dorsum toward the prey, left lateral side toward the prey and right lateral side […]
How To: Smartphone Assessment of Penile Deformity
Another example of researchers bending new technology to meet their desires: “Validity and Reliability of a Smartphone Application for the Assessment of Penile Deformity in Peyronie’s Disease,” Ryan S. Hsi, James M. Hotaling, Andrea L. Hartzler, Sarah K. Holt, Thomas J. Walsh, Journal of Sexual Medicine, epub April 3, 2013. The authors, at the University […]
A minute-and-a-half of mesmerizing geometry
This mesmerizing, quick (yet stop-motion!) music video points to a good many aspects of the pastime known as “geometry“. The video, called “Proteigon: A Geometric Stop Motion Short“, is by Steven Briand. [vimeo]33480080[/vimeo] (Via @JenLucPiquant and Colossal)
Geometrical regularity of the top of a man’s head
Wikipedia shows this pair of photographs of a man, taken in 1953. They are police mug shots: The man seems to have had a peculiar haircut, one that looks very different from the sides than from the front. From the front there is a strong, tripartite geometric regularity evident to the top third of his […]
How to make a moebius bagel
George W. Hart devised an elegant, mathematical way to slice a bagel [AIR 16:1]: It is not hard to cut a bagel into two equal halves which are linked like two links of a chain. The line ABCDA, which goes smoothly through all four key points, is the cut line. As it goes 360 degrees […]
GeoCrypt
The best-named scientific conference of the year, so far, is the GeoCrypt conference: The GeoCrypt 2009 conference will take place at Hôtel Fleur d’Épée (Le Gosier), about 6km from Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, French West Indies [from April 27-May 1]… The purpose of the conference is to bring together researchers from arithmetic geometry and from cryptography and […]