My friends up north tell me they have quite enough snowflakes already, thank you. Nevertheless, Janko Gravner and David Griffeath are making more. Or, rather, they’re making snowfakes (the word is theirs, not mine):

In case there’s any doubt, the image above is not a photograph of a real snowflake; it’s an incredible simulation.
Mathematical and […]

Two of the best science-blog articles of 2007 appeared early in the year at Cosmic Variance. They were written by John Conway (not the John Conway, the other John Conway) and gave an inside view of what happens in a large experimental collaboration when there’s a hint of glory in the air. The CDF experiment—one […]

The drawing below, brazenly swiped from a 1964 Martin Gardner column, illustrates the solution to a well-known puzzle. If you stack n bricks on a table, how far can you make them extend over the edge without toppling?

The answer given, for bricks of unit length, is one-half the nth harmonic number, the sum of the […]

Hardware is hard, whereas software is soft; the people who named these things knew what they were talking about.
A while ago, I volunteered to help a friend upgrade the disk drive of an Apple iBook. My first clue that this was going to be a fun project was learning that we needed a special […]

Quantum computing gets a lot of attention, but we don’t hear much about quantum mathematics. The very idea is an affront to Platonist thinkers everywhere—those of us who consider the elements of mathematics to be independent of the physical universe. Is the truth of the Pythagorean theorem subject to the same uncertainty as the fate […]

Doing some laundry last night, I threw a duvet cover and nine pairs of socks into the dryer together. (Household hint: Don’t.) The duvet cover is a giant fabric pouch with a slit along one side; think of a queen-size pita pocket. Initially, all the socks were outside the pouch. When I pulled the load […]

The mathematics section of the arXiv archived 989 preprints in October. Why is that fact worth noting? Because arXiv papers are identified by numbers of the format YYMMNNN, with two digits for the year, two digits for the month, and a three-digit sequence number. Ten more papers and all the world’s mathematicians would have been […]

I can cook anything, as long as the recipe starts with “Take it out of the freezer” and ends with “Put it in the microwave.”
Go ahead and scoff, but I’m proud of my culinary accomplishments. Furthermore, I submit that the art of microwaving frozen foods is not without intellectual challenge. Inferior technique could leave […]

It’s no secret that the way to win fame and fortune in physics is to invent a better refrigerator. Michael Faraday and James Prescott Joule and J. J. Thomson (Lord Kelvin) were all thinkers or tinkerers in refrigeration; the Kelvinator brand alludes to the last of those pioneers. Einstein and Leo Szilard held dozens of […]

Scientists are selfless seekers after truth, unswayed by worldly emoluments, immune to the tawdry enticements of fame, indifferent to prizes and honors. Thus I can’t quite imagine why anyone would bother ranking a collection of scientific papers by applying the algorithm that Google uses to decide which Web pages deserve the most prominent display. Nonetheless, […]