God may not play dice with the Universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers [Paul Erdös, paraphrasing Albert Einstein] The prime numbers are the atoms of the natural number system. We recall that a prime number is a natural number greater than one that cannot be broken into smaller factors. Every natural … Continue reading The Prime Number Theorem
Month: February 2014
Euclid in Technicolor
The article in this week’s That’s Maths column in the Irish Times ( TM039 ) is about Oliver Byrne's amazing technicolor Elements of Euclid, recently re-published by Taschen. Oliver Byrne (1810–1890), a Victorian civil engineer, was a prolific writer on science. He published more than twenty books on mathematics and several more on mechanics. The … Continue reading Euclid in Technicolor
Speed Cubing & Group Theory
The article in this week’s That’s Maths column in the Irish Times ( TM038 ) is about Rubik's Cube and the Group Theory that underlies its solution. The Rubik's cube craze ran through the world like wildfire in the 1980s. This simple mechanical puzzle is made from small pieces, called “cubies”, in a 3x3x3 structure … Continue reading Speed Cubing & Group Theory
French Curves and Bézier Splines
A French curve is a template, normally plastic, used for manually drawing smooth curves. These simple drafting instruments provided innocent if puerile merriment to generations of engineering students, but they have now been rendered obsolete by computer aided design (CAD) packages, which enable us to construct complicated curves and surfaces using mathematical functions called Bézier … Continue reading French Curves and Bézier Splines
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