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Category Archives: English
What is the way of packing oranges? — Kepler’s conjecture on the packing of spheres
Originating author is Christiane Rousseau. What is the densest packing of spheres? Kepler conjectured that it was the one you observe with oranges at the fruit shop, and which is called the face-centered cubic lattice (Figure 1). At the International … Continue reading
Higher Dimensions
Originating authors are Markus Ruppert and Hans-Georg Weigand. 1. Looking for the next dimension Does our world really have more than three dimensions? If so, do objects in higher dimension have a relation to the world around us? Is it … Continue reading
Benford’s law: learning to fraud or to detect frauds?
Originating author is Christiane Rousseau. It is very risky to change too many numbers in some financial statements if one does not know some mathematics. Indeed, most often the numbers appearing in financial statements follow some strange mathematical rule, called … Continue reading
Map colouring and Gröbner Bases
Originating author is Marcelo Escudeiro Hernandes. By the famous “Four Colour Theorem”, only four colours we need to colour a map so that no bordering regions have the same colour. Using polynomial equations and Gröbner bases we can determine if … Continue reading
Symmetry Step by Step
Originating author is Ana Cannas da Silva. Symmetry has always fascinated and served humankind in architecture, arts, engineering and science. Over thousands of years symmetric patterns have been used to create fabrics, baskets, floors, wallpapers and wrapping papers, and so … Continue reading
Recurrence and induction
Originating authors are Michèle Artigue and Ferdinando Arzarello. Given a square grid, it is easy to draw squares whose vertices are intersections of the grid lines. But is it possible to do so for other regular polygons, for instance an … Continue reading
Mathematicians’s Delight
December’s Book of the Month is Mathematician’s Delight by W. W. Sawyer, Dover Publications 2007 (originally Penguin Books, 1943). This is Sawyer’s first book, and was written with the aim “to dispel the fear of mathematics.” According to the W. … Continue reading
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Math Here and Now
December’s Site of the Month: Math Here and Now This is one of the High School resource pages of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. It contains up to date instances of mathematics in our world. Each example has … Continue reading
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Mathematical Association of America
November’s Site of the Month: Mathematical Association of America A comprehensive site aimed primarily at the undergraduate level, but useful for all those interested in mathematics. At the bottom of the page the Community Centre is worth exploring: the SIGMAA’s … Continue reading
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Gödel, Escher, Bach – An Eternal Golden Braid
November’s Book of the Month is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter (Basic Books, 1979). This book is about symmetry, self-reference, and other fundamental mathematical ideas explored through the works of the three people named … Continue reading
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