Mathematics

Magazine articles on mathematics.

Old Articles: <Older 11-20 Newer>

Science News September 9, 2000 Ivars Peterson	Defending the Roman Empire One issue that often came up in my board-game forays into international intrigue was how to deploy my limited forces to defend far-flung territories while I plotted to conquer the world. Such questions of military strategy can be handled mathematically.
Science News September 2, 2000	Mobius at Fermilab A description of three-dimensional variants of the Mobius band and mathematical forms in art.
Science News September 2, 2000	Dimensions of Math Web site that allows you to Ponder Penrose tilings, gravitational lenses, and tic-tac-toe on a torus.
Science News August 26, 2000 Ivars Peterson	Scrambled Grids Amazingly simple mathematical operations can lead to intriguingly complex results. Consider, for instance, the iterative geometric process of creating flaky pastry dough...
Science News August 19, 2000 Ivars Peterson	Goldbach's Prime Pairs Evenly divisible only by themselves and one, primes are a rich source of speculative ideas that mathematicians often find simple to state but difficult to prove. The Goldbach conjecture is a prime example of such a conundrum.
Science News August 12, 2000 Ivars Peterson	Art of the Grid The practice of laying a grid on top of a drawing, then painstakingly copying each line of the drawing to the corresponding cell of a blank grid has a long history in both mathematics and art.
Science News July 22, 2000 Ivars Peterson	Turtle Tracks Using the computer language LOGO, children can produce a list of commands to govern the motion of a "turtle" and trace out a geometric track on the computer screen. Mathematicians can use similar algorithms to generate fractals and other forms.
Science News July 15, 2000 Ivars Peterson	Pinpointing Prey The sand scorpion uses two types of sensors on the tips of its legs to detect mechanical vibrations transmitted over relatively short distances across the surface
Science News July 8, 2000 Ivars Peterson	Mobius and his Band Discovered in a purely mathematical context, the Mobius strip is the best known of the various toys of topology. Since its discovery in the 19th century, it has also achieved a life of its own beyond mathematics---in magic, science, engineering, literature, music, and art...
Science News June 17, 2000 Ivars Peterson	Punctured Polyhedra Is there a polyhedron in Euclidean three-dimensional space that has only finitely many plane faces, each of which is a closed connected subset of the appropriate plane whose relative interior in that plane is multiply connected?
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