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Klein Concert
Maria Mannone from the University of Palermo is a theoretical physicist and a musician (composer and conductor). Her field of interest is mathematical music theory. She and her students have created music based on the Klein bottle. In May 2019 … Continue reading
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Site of the Month: 3Blue1Brown
3Blue1Brown presents animated videos about mathematics. It was created by Grant Sanderson, a graduate student from Stanford University who worked for Khan Academy. He created a YouTube-channel with videos on calculus, linear algebra, geometry, topology, and many special topics such as … Continue reading
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Developing Research in Mathematics Education
August’s book of the month is Developing Research in Mathematics Education: Twenty Years of Communication, Cooperation and Collaboration in Europe, edited by Tommy Dreyfus, Michèle Artigue, Despina Potari, Susanne Prediger, and Kenneth Ruthven. It is the first book in the … Continue reading
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How Google works: Markov chains and eigenvalues
Originating author is Christiane Rousseau. From its very beginning, Google became “the” search engine. This comes from the supremacy of its ranking algorithm: the PageRank algorithm. Indeed, with the enormous quantity of pages on the World-Wide-Web, many searches end up … Continue reading
Dimension
Originating author is Christiane Rousseau. How do we measure the size of a geometric object? For subsets of the plane we often use perimeter, length, area, diameter, etc. These are not sufficient to describe fractals. The fractal objects are very … Continue reading
Fair voting: the quest for gold
Originating authors are Gabriel Rosenberg and Mark Iwen. It is a little known fact that two gold medals were awarded for the same pairs figure skating competition in the 2002 Winter Olympics. These two medals were ultimately a result of … Continue reading
Banach’s microscope to find a fixed point
Originating author is Christiane Rousseau. In this vignette, we will show how we start from a small game to discover one of the most powerful theorems of mathematics, namely the Banach fixed point theorem. This theorem has fantastic applications inside … Continue reading
A tale of two triangles: Heron triangles and elliptic curves
Originating author is William Mc Callum. If two triangles have the same area and the same perimeter, are they necessarily congruent? It turns out that the answer is no. For example, the triangle with sides and has the same area … Continue reading