Posts Tagged ‘geometry’
Everything goes better with sharks…
Sharks!
Given the successes of “Shark Week” and Sharknado, it’s a sure bet that Hollywood will move to remake the classics to feature those creepily-cartilaginous predators. See what to expect at Sharks Make Movies Better.
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As we decide that it isn’t yet, perhaps, safe to go back into the water, we might might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri; he was born on this date in 1667. A Jesuit priest and Scholastic philosopher, Saccheri is probably best remembered for his attempt to disprove the fifth postulate of Euclid (“through any point not on a given line, one and only one line can be drawn that is parallel to the given line”). In fact, Saccheri’s thinking closely mirrored that of Omar Khayyám’s 11th Century Discussion of Difficulties in Euclid (Risâla fî sharh mâ ashkala min musâdarât Kitâb ‘Uglîdis)– though it’s not clear that Saccheri knew the earlier work.
In any case, Saccheri’s Euclides ab omni naevo vindicatus (Euclid Freed of Every Flaw, 1733) helped lay the foundation for what we now call Non-Euclidean Geometry.
Knowing when to hold ’em; knowing when to fold ’em…
The documentary Holy Rollers follows the rise of the Church Team, arguably the largest and most well-funded blackjack team in North America. This unlikely group of Christians, pastors, worship leaders and church-planters mastered the art of card counting and marched into traditionally forbidden territory – casinos – to beat the house at it’s own game to the tune of millions of dollars.
It all started as a hobby for two friends, Ben and Colin, who wanted to do something interesting with their math skills and investment money. After making a living off blackjack for a several years, friends and family started asking to be trained as card counters under their professional blackjack expertise. Before long, word spread through church circles and an uncommon fellowship began to form. Led by team managers Ben & Colin, the team quickly grew to include more than 25 players based all over the United States.
In their first year, the Church Team acquired a bankroll of $1.5 million from outside investors, and the team was winning $100,000 a month. In spite of the team’s phenomenal success, many team members remained conflicted, wrestling with how to justify being a Christian and playing blackjack for a living. They found themselves at odds with their own families, congregants, and fellow Christians who feared that they were wandering into morally bankrupt territory.
When the team’s winnings decrease drastically, questions start being raised as to whether someone from the team might be stealing from the bankroll. Where trust is sacred and God sees all, is it even possible? Of course. But do they trust the players on their team? Absolutely. Maybe.
More, on the film’s web site.
As we decide to stand, we might wish a twisted Happy Birthday to the theoretical astronomer and mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius; he was born on this date in 1790. While Möbius made many contributions to geometry (e.g., the Möbius configuration, the Möbius transform, and the Möbius function), he is surely best remembered for his nifty Möbius Strip– a two-dimensional surface with only one side.
A Möbius strip made with a piece of paper and tape. If an ant were to crawl along the length of this strip, it would return to its starting point having traversed every part of the strip (on both sides of the original paper) without ever crossing an edge.
And that’s a lot…
From the cornucopia that is Network Awesome:
Buckminster Fuller – Everything I Know
In 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave a series of lectures concerning his entire life’s work. These lectures span 42 hours and examine all of Fuller’s major inventions and discoveries.
During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life’s work. These thinking out loud lectures span 42 hours and examine in depth all of Fuller’s major inventions and discoveries from the 1927 Dymaxion house, car and bathroom, through the Wichita House, geodesic domes, and tensegrity structures, as well as the contents of Synergetics. Autobiographical in parts, Fuller recounts his own personal history in the context of the history of science and industrialization. The stories behind his Dymaxion car, geodesic domes, World Game and integration of science and humanism are lucidly communicated with continuous reference to his synergetic geometry. Permeating the entire series is his unique comprehensive design approach to solving the problems of the world. Some of the topics Fuller covered in this wide ranging discourse include: architecture, design, philosophy, education, mathematics, geometry, cartography, economics, history, structure, industry, housing and engineering…
Network Awesome is featuring one part of the series starting each Wednesday, here (and in their archive). Or readers can turn to YouTube. In either case, the pieces are bite-sized… and well worth the watching.
As we endeavor to “think outside the dome,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1974– as Fuller was agreeing to do the lectures featured above– that Paul Anka hit #1 on Billboard‘s Hot 100 with “(You’re) Having My Baby.”
Pictures worth a million words…
In his great opus De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium published shortly before his death in 1543, Copernicus takes 405 pages of words, numbers and equations to explain his heliocentric theory. But it is the diagram that he draws at the beginning of the book that captures in a simple image his revolutionary new idea: it is the Sun that is at the centre of the Solar System, not the Earth.
A diagram has the power to create a whole new visual language to navigate a scientific idea. Isaac Newton’s optics diagrams [Opticks, 1704] for example transform light into geometry. By representing light as lines, Newton is able to use mathematics and geometry to predict the behaviour of light. It was a revolutionary idea.
Mathematicians had been struggling with the idea of the square root of minus one. There seemed to be no number on the number line whose square was negative. Experts knew that if such a number existed it would transform their subject. But where was this number? It was a picture drawn independently by three mathematicians at the beginning of the 19th Century that brought these numbers to life. Called the Argand diagram after one of its creators, this picture… was a potent tool in manipulating these new numbers [Imaginary Numbers] since the geometry of the diagram reflected the underlying algebra of the numbers they depicted.
Although better known for her contributions to nursing, Florence Nightingale’s greatest achievements were mathematical. She was the first to use the idea of a pie chart to represent data. Nightingale’s diagrams were designed to highlight deaths in the Crimea. She had discovered that the majority of deaths in the Crimea were due to poor sanitation rather than casualties in battle. She wanted to persuade government of the need for better hygiene in hospitals. She realised though that just looking at the numbers was unlikely to impress ministers. But once those numbers were translated into a picture – her “Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East” – the message could not be ignored.
Read more (and find links to enlarged versions of the images above) at BBC.com, in “Diagrams that Changed the World,” a teaser for new BBC TV series, Marcus du Sautoy’s six-part The Beauty of Diagrams (on air now, and available via iPlayer to readers in the U.K… and readers with VPNs that can terminate in the U.K.)
As we marvel at the power of pictures, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that eight planets in our Solar System lined up from West to East– beginning with Pluto, followed by Mercury, Mars, Venus, Uranus, Neptune, Saturn and Jupiter, with a crescent moon alongside– in a rare alignment visible from Earth. Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn were visible to the naked eye; the small blue dots that are Uranus and Neptune, with binoculars. Pluto was visible only by telescope (but has subsequently been demoted from “planet” anyway…). The planets also aligned in May 2000, but too close to the sun to be visible from Earth.
Readers who missed it have a long wait for the reprise: it will be at least another 100 years before so many planets will be so close and so visible.
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