All Stories by Ivars Peterson
- Math
A Stranger from Spaceland
“It was the last day of the 1999th year of our era. The pattering of the rain To a Flatlander, a sphere passing through Flatland appears as a line of changing length. had long ago announced nightfall; and I was sitting in the company of my wife, musing on the events of the past and […]
- Humans
An Artist’s Timely Riddles
A team of researchers demonstrates that there may be much more to the art of Marcel Duchamp than meets the casual, or even critical, eye.
- Math
Setting Records Randomly
A wide variety of factors can influence the winning time of a race. For a given event over the course of a year, for example, the results may depend on the quality of the runners, the race location, weather conditions, and so on. In a 1985 article in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, […]
- Math
Crystal Möbius
Take a ribbon of paper, twist one end 180 degrees, and attach it to the other end. The resulting surface, called a Möbius strip, has only one side and one edge. Scanning electron microscope image shows niobium selenide crystals in a Möbius-strip conformation (top). In the schematic diagram (bottom), a white ribbon represents a niobium […]
- Math
Prime Effort: Powerful conjecture may be proved
A mathematician may have finally proved Catalan's conjecture, a venerable problem in number theory concerning relationships among powers of whole numbers.
- Math
A Lawyer’s Math Library
“Strangely enough, anyone wishing to write about Galois in Paris would do well to journey to Louisville, Kentucky.”–Leopold Infeld, Whom the Gods Love LOUISVILLE, KY. French mathematician Evariste Galois (1811–1832), whose death in a duel at the age of 20 cut short a remarkably productive career, is only one of many mathematicians represented in a […]
- Math
Song-and-Dance Fermat
The proof of a mathematical conjecture–even one as famous as Fermat’s last theorem–may sound like an improbable subject for an off-Broadway-style musical. Yet there’s plenty of drama and passion in the story of Fermat’s last theorem. These elements take center stage in Fermat’s Last Tango, a musical written by the husband-and-wife team Joshua Rosenblum and […]
- Math
Filling In Blanks
Researchers are developing automated methods based on differential equations to reduce the time and effort required to fix digital images, not only to fill in blank areas but also to remove extraneous objects.
- Math
Prime Spirals
Precisely defined yet enticingly elusive, prime numbers occupy a central place in number theory. Evenly divisible only by themselves and 1, these special integers–2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, and so on–pose all sorts of conundrums. In a square grid, numbering squares instead of line intersections serves as […]
- Math
Getting Clobbered
Clobber is a new two-person game that’s easy to learn and fun to play and, for the mathematically inclined, rife with analytical possibility. Initial placement of white and black stones on a 5 x 6 rectangular board. The “standard” game is played on a rectangular grid of squares–say, a portion of a checkerboard. One player […]
- Math
Tricky Dice Revisited
The game involves a set of four cubic dice, each one numbered differently. You let your opponent pick any one of the four dice. You choose one of the remaining three. Each player tosses his or her die, and the higher number wins. Amazingly, in a game involving 10 or more turns, you will nearly […]
- Math
Tricky Dice Revisited
The game involves a set of four cubic dice, each one numbered differently. You let your opponent pick any one of the four dice. You choose one of the remaining three. Each player tosses his or her die, and the higher number wins. Amazingly, in a game involving 10 or more turns, you will nearly […]
