Ivars Peterson

All Stories by Ivars Peterson

  1. Math

    Artful Routes

    Finding the shortest routes linking cities can also produce intricate continuous-line portraits.

  2. Math

    Sphere Worlds

    Painting on spheres offers a novel perspective on the world.

  3. Math

    Pennies in a Tray

    Packing pennies in circular trays can lead to intriguing mathematical complexities.

  4. Math

    Cruise Control and Traffic Flow

    Adaptive cruise control can help smooth out traffic flow.

  5. Math

    Visions of Infinity

    Tiling a hyperbolic floor inspires both mathematics and art.

  6. Math

    Proof clarifies a map-folding problem

    Researchers have developed an efficient algorithm to determine, given a collection of creases on a piece of paper, whether a sequence of simple folds produces a flat result, like a folded road map.

  7. Math

    Cruise Control and Traffic Flow

    Adaptive cruise control can help smooth out traffic flow.

  8. Math

    The Iced Foot Effect

    Does calling a timeout as a defensive strategy to "ice" a kicker in football actually reduce the chances of a successful field goal kick?

  9. Math

    Football’s Overtime Bias

    The coin toss appears to play a significant role in deciding the winner in pro football's sudden-death overtime.

  10. Math

    Squaring Circles

    Cutting a circle into pieces and reassembling the fragments to form a square is a tricky proposition.

  11. Math

    Young Gauss

    Mathematical anecdotes don't always tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  12. Math

    Prime proof zeros in on crucial numbers

    A new theorem may lead to a proof of Catalan's conjecture, a venerable problem in number theory concerning consecutive powers of whole numbers.