# Lattice of Partitions

This picture by Tilman Piesk shows the 15 partitions of a 4-element set, ordered by refinement. Finer partitions are connected to coarser ones by lines going down. In the finest partition, on top, each of the 4 elements is in its own subset. In the coarsest one, on bottom, all 4 elements are in the same subset.

# Harmonic Orbit

The Kepler problem concerns a particle moving under the influence of gravity, like a planet moving around the Sun. Newton showed the orbit of such a particle is an ellipse, assuming it doesn’t fly off to infinity. There are many ways to prove this, but the most illuminating is to reparametrize time and think of the orbit as a circle in 4 dimensions. When the circle is projected down to 3-dimensional space, it becomes an ellipse. The animation in this post, created by Greg Egan, shows how this works.

# Twin Dodecahedra

Here Greg Egan has drawn two regular dodecahedra, in red and blue. They share 8 corners—and these are the corners of a cube, shown in green. Adrian Ocneanu calls these twin dodecahedra, and has proved some fascinating results about them.

# Branched Cover from (4 4 3/2) Schwarz Triangle

A Schwarz triangle is a spherical triangle that can be used to generate a tiling of a branched covering of the sphere by repeatedly reflecting this triangle across its edges. Sometimes we get an actual tiling of the sphere, but in general we get a branched covering, because the same point can lie in the…

# Small Cubicuboctahedron

This is the small cubicuboctahedron, as drawn by Robert Webb’s Great Stella software. It looks simple enough, but it conceals some interesting mathematics.

# Schmidt Arrangement

This picture drawn by Katherine Stange shows what happens when we apply fractional linear transformations $z \mapsto \frac{a z + b}{c z + d}$ to the real line sitting in the complex plane, where $a,b,c,d$ are Eisenstein integers that is, complex numbers of the form $m + n \exp(2 \pi i/3)$ with $m,n$ being integers.

# Pentagon-Decagon Branched Covering

Two regular pentagons and a regular decagon fit snugly at a point: their interior angles sum to 360°. Despite this, you cannot tile the plane with regular pentagons and decagons. However, there is a branched covering of the plane tiled with pentagons and decagons, which map to regular pentagons and decagons on the plane. Here Greg Egan has drawn a portion of this branched covering.

# Pentagon-Decagon Packing

Two regular pentagons and a regular decagon meet snugly at a vertex: their interior angles sum to 360°. However, they can’t tile the plane. However, they come fairly close, as shown in this picture by Greg Egan.