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What Hot Dogs Can Teach Us About Number Theory Quanta Magazine, November 18, 2021 No hot dog is complete without a bun. So it’s maddening that you typically have to buy eight buns at a time, but you can’t buy exactly eight hot dogs. Getting one package of each will leave you with two extra…
Just how fat are the fat bears? High Country News, September 29, 2021 It’s fat bear season. Every fall, bears in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve gorge themselves before hibernating. Hundreds of thousands of people tune in to livestreams and vote for their favorite fat bear. But how fat are they really? In the…
How Math Solved the Case of the Volcanic Bombs That Didn’t Explode The New York Times, September 11, 2021 You probably don’t want to get up close to an erupting volcano to study the magma “bombs” that it shoots out. Luckily, the power of mathematics allowed researchers to discover why some volcanic bombs fall to…
New mathematical record: what’s the point of calculating pi? The Guardian, August 17, 2021 Pi is something more than just a number. Pi has infinitely many digits after its decimal point and no observable pattern. It’s a classic example of so-called “transcendental numbers,” which can’t be calculated from any combination of ratios, powers, and roots…
Is This Some Kind of Code? You Can Solve the … The New York Times, June 25, 2021 What would a font based on Tetris look like? What about a Sudoku font, or a juggling font? Erik and Martin Demaine, a computer scientist and an artist, have designed a multitude of “algorithmic puzzle fonts,” mathematically…