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Marrakech: The Style | Mustapha Blaoui’s Showroom
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(by floridapfe)
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Lemurs, Madagascar
Photo: Stephen AlvarezDecken’s sifakas appear right at home in their karst home in western Madagascar. These lemurs live...
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Mathematical art — from sculptures to crochet blossoms, scientists demonstrate how math makes beautiful art.
The art was featured at an exhibition last month at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Boston, where 80 artists presented more than 120 works.
Gabriele Meyer, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin Math Department, showed her crochets of colorful “hyperbolic surfaces” (imagine a rainbow fluorescent head of lettuce). “In math if you want to prove something really beautiful, you have to understand the structure,” she explains. “And the structure means you understand the beauty of an object and with that knowledge you often times can make a very important and deep proof. That’s why beauty matters tremendously in mathematics.”
(Segment produced by Sarah Reynolds, Studio 360.)
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Clio Cresswell says couples who compromise the least tend to have the longest-lasting relationships. She also says that out of 100 possible partners, you’re mathematically likely to make the right choice if you pick the most attractive person who’s left after 37 dates.
Cresswell lectures in math at the University of South Wales in Australia and is the author of “Mathematics and Sex.” In this interview from To the Best of Our Knowledge, she explains how you can use mathematics to aid you in your love life.
“If you picked 12 people, and then choose the next best after that for you — so that could be number 13 or 105 — that will give you an over 75 percent chance of picking someone in the top 10 or 20 percent,” Cresswell said.
