MeFi Projects

Every year mathematics YouTuber 3Blue1Brown runs a contest called the Summer of Math Exposition which encourages people, who might not otherwise do so, to publish explanations on math related topics. It's the third year of the contest but the first year I actually had an idea. [more inside]
posted by Mister_Sleight_of_Hand on Aug 12, 2023 - 3 comments

Spent the last week executing an idea I had earlier this month: a stained glass piece based on the Toothpick Sequence, a simple mathematical ruleset about line-drawing that generates complicated results. I ended up going with four color scheme for the collection of rectangles and squares, and so: Mondrian's Toothpicks.
posted by cortex on Jan 30, 2023 - 5 comments

A couple of years ago, Harvard statistics PhD student Kareem Carr ignited a firestorm of debate when he talked about 2+2=5. Apples kept coming up in the debate as the quintessential example of a countable thing. "I have two apples. I get two more apples. Now I have four apples. Always. Math is never wrong." For some reason the example was always apples. Thinking about that finally bore fruit in the making of this: How many apples do you count in this image? [more inside]
posted by clawsoon on Mar 29, 2022 - 18 comments

My new book, Shape, comes out this coming Tuesday, May 25! This book is about geometry: in it you'll find gerrymandering, pandemics, the foundations of AI, poetry, math/theology beefs of late-czarist Russia, championship-level checkers, the Talmud, why you are your own negative-1st cousin, wrinkles in time, and a lot more. It's not just about triangles (though there are some triangles in it.) The New York Times calls it "unreasonably entertaining," and there's an excerpt in this weekend's Wall Street Journal (paywalled.) Shape is available for preorder now at Bookshop and Amazon, and of course it will be at your local bookstore on Tuesday!
posted by escabeche on May 23, 2021 - 8 comments

I spent the last half of January fixated on a simple mathematical proposition about arranging short twisting lines on a square grid, which I nicknamed "Fogleworms"; the terminus (so far) of that particular obsession is this series of 96 modular linocut prints and their four derived "ghost" prints, each mathematically unique. [more inside]
posted by cortex on Mar 15, 2021 - 3 comments

Inverse hessian multiplication in linear gradient time has been an open problem in neural networks since Reagan was president or so. I believe I have a successful attack on the problem and like an idiot I posted it on a blog instead of like a journal or something. Done with Something Awful goons yelling at me the whole while
posted by hleehowon on Jan 7, 2019 - 0 comments

I've been painting a lot lately, exploring in particular mathematical themes and especially variations on the Menger sponge. I'm proud of the progress I've made, and have built a simple site to show off my finished work: Art by Josh Millard.

I've also been writing about art process stuff on my blog, e.g. a step-by-step document of the execution of yesterday's new painting, Five Concentric Wireframe Cubes.
posted by cortex on Jun 7, 2017 - 10 comments

I spent the last few days hand-painting a couple of fractal images—a Menger sponge and a Cantor set—on the wall of my home office. This is a writeup of how and why I did it, with some bonus thoughts on the weird nature of the fractal series behind the images.
posted by cortex on Jun 8, 2016 - 12 comments

I'm currently taking Harvard Business School's HBX CORe, an online business fundamentals course that covers analytics, accounting, and economics. I'm writing up what I'm learning and making it accessible to non-MBA types. Topics covered include minimum wage, the math behind trendlines, and why the Spiders Georg meme is off, amongst others!
posted by divabat on Mar 6, 2016 - 2 comments

posted by xchmp on Sep 6, 2014 - 0 comments

After three years of work, my book HOW NOT TO BE WRONG: THE POWER OF MATHEMATICAL THINKING comes out today from Penguin Press! It's about math. Also: baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia’s views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, packing 24-dimensional spheres, what Facebook can and can’t figure out about you, the invention of calculus, and the existence of God. The book is available at Amazon, Indiebound, Waterstones, and (I hope!) your local bookstore. MetaFilter has been a fantastically useful resource for me in putting this together; partly because I can use Ask for my questions about statistical significance in different languages and stockpicking scams, but more importantly because I've learned so much about how to write about math for non-mathematicians from writing about math on MetaFilter!
posted by escabeche on May 29, 2014 - 13 comments

This is a fairly simple concept site to try to convey just how enormous exponential growth becomes. It counts to 2^63rd power at 100 increments per second, with notes about what might be happening when that next bit, in this case a square on an 8x8 grid, turns black. Hoping people can use it as a tool to inspire a little wonder in math.
posted by locrelite on Mar 28, 2014 - 3 comments

I have been working with video journalist Brady Haran on a series of hand made animations for science videos. Other videos include:Numbers Confuse Americans, Maths Jokes Explained and Lagrange Points. I'm currently auctioning the drawings used to make the dimensions video here.
posted by pmcp on Aug 28, 2013 - 5 comments

Voronoi Monologue is an "infinite series" of drawings based around malformations of voronoi patterns. [more inside]
posted by pmcp on Jun 20, 2013 - 0 comments

I'm working on this little toy that takes subsequences from the hexadecimal expansion of pi and represents them as 500x500px images. [more inside]
posted by invitapriore on Apr 26, 2013 - 3 comments

This is a video about a math camp in Maseno, Kenya, that I've helped coordinate for the last two years. The idea is to give secondary school students a new perspective on mathematics, and expose teachers to activity-based teaching methods. We're aiming to get across the idea that math is about the concepts rather than the drills, understanding rather than mindless computation, beauty rather than grades. The video runs about 13 minutes, but there's a catchy song at the beginning to rope you in and get the idea across more quickly. Finally, there's a blog post here outlining a bit of the work we've been up to this year. [more inside]
posted by kaibutsu on Oct 22, 2012 - 0 comments

What environmental catastrophe is your neighbor? A map of all 1.6k Superfund sites and an instant finder for your own by using some interesting math hacks.
posted by tmcw on Sep 29, 2011 - 8 comments

The first of a serious of neat little side projects from my usual work on MapBox and the like - a new kind of map (I call it a 'squiggle') and a new pretty map. But, hopefully a lot more than that - I documented the process of creating the map in serious detail, and it goes over re-teaching myself high school trig, writing a scraper for Garmin Connect, trying to fake being a real artist, and figuring out some new map interactions. There's more to come, and ideally this convinces the big groups that hold onto our data to let us get at it to make more beautiful things.
posted by tmcw on Aug 1, 2011 - 4 comments

MathFall is a genre defining, or genre defying, iPhone game that features elements of both puzzle and arcade gameplay. It is also a great educational tool that hones your math skills...in real time. [more inside]
posted by spacefire on Jun 7, 2011 - 5 comments

I'm a big fan of recreational mathematics. I would, from time to time, poke around The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences and be startled both by the sheer volume of it, and also by the nuggets of deeply interesting sequences I would occasionally find. After a year of dithering, I've finally started keeping a blog discussing (in brief detail) interesting sequences found therein.
posted by Plutor on Apr 11, 2011 - 3 comments

Get a random, 64 question addition/subtraction test on every view! [more inside]
posted by Mr. Anthropomorphism on Jan 27, 2011 - 3 comments

This is an ongoing collection of sketches and comics that I have worked on. Check out the word frequency table and words diagrammed from chart's rules. There is even some speculation on squaring the circle. There are a couple of comics, and even some abstract sketches. More to come...
posted by candasartan on Dec 27, 2010 - 1 comment

Some people believe that patterns or structures are the fundamental reality. I would like to find more of these people.
posted by leibniz on Oct 21, 2010 - 25 comments