Wild About Math! Making Math fun and accessible

Wild About Math blogs 4/29/11

Welcome to another edition of Wild About Math blogs!

Playing With Mathematica has taken its maiden voyage. If you're a Mathematica lover, or wish you were, check out the new site. I'm engaging the community of Mathematica wizards to help me get up to speed and you benefit because I'll be taking apart Mathematica programs that do neat things and explaining them step by step in a Mathematica notebook. You will need Mathematica to open and interact with the notebooks so I realize that the site won't be for everyone. But, for many people, I believe it will fill an education gap.

math4love has a great article about algorithmic art, including a video of a "human algorithm." The article is of particular interest to me as I dive into Mathematica as I see Math+art as a great medium for exploration. Be sure to follow the links in the article.

Alfred Posamentier is a great writer of popular Math books. I've never seen him or heard him speak, until now.

Hat tip to Shecky.

Steven Colyer at Multiplication by Infinity has a nice and not very long review of Dr. Euler's Fabulous Formula: Cures Many Mathematical Ills.

And, while we're on the subject of Euler, Dave Richeson at Division by Zero reports that April 15th was Euler's 304th birthday and the the Euler Archive has a new home.

This labor of love, created and run by Dominic Klyve, Lee Stemkoski, and Erik Tou, houses thousands of pages of Euler’s original works as well as a growing number of translations of Euler’s works.

The site had been located at Dartmouth College, where the trio attended graduate school. But it has now move to the servers of the MAA: http://eulerarchive.maa.org/

If you've ever wanted your very own Pi poster your wait is over. There's one over at 10 Minute Math waiting for you.

In your spare time you might want to peruse some of the 8000+ Mathematics, Physics, and Engineering applets compiled by Guillermo at Mathematics and Multimedia.

I'll leave you with this fun challenge from Alex Bellos, revived from an old book.

One of my favourite maths puzzles is “the four fours”: find an expression for every digit from 0 to 100 using exactly four 4s.

You can use any basic mathematical operation you like, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

There's a bit more to the puzzle than just the piece I quoted so be sure to read Bellos' article.