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A book of mathematical articles, That’s Maths, has just been published. The collection of 100 articles includes pieces that have appeared in The Irish Times over the past few years, blog posts from this website and a number of articles that have not appeared before.
The book has been published by Gill Books and copies are available through all good booksellers in Ireland, and from major online booksellers. An E-Book is also available online.
The chaotic flow of water cascading down a mountainside is known as turbulence. It is complex, irregular and unpredictable, but we should count our blessings that it exists. Without turbulence, we would gasp for breath, struggling to absorb oxygen or be asphyxiated by the noxious fumes belching from motorcars, since pollutants would not be dispersed through the atmosphere [TM101, or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com].
Turbulent flow behind a cylindrical obstacle [image from “An Album of Fluid Motion”, Milton Van Dyke, 1982].
Johannes Kepler’s amazing book, Mysterium Cosmographicum, was published in 1596. Kepler’s central idea was that the distance relationships between the six planets (only six were known at that time) could be represented by six spheres separated by the five Platonic solids. For each of these regular polyhedra, there is an inner and an outer sphere. The inner sphere is tangent to the centre of each face and the outer sphere contains all the vertices of the polyhedron.
Figure generated using Mathematica Demonstration [2].
Continue reading ‘Kepler’s Magnificent Mysterium Cosmographicum’
Every number is interesting. Suppose there were uninteresting numbers. Then there would be a smallest one. But this is an interesting property, contradicting the supposition. By reductio ad absurdum, there are none!
This is the hundredth “That’s Maths” article to appear in The Irish Times [TM100, or search for “thatsmaths” at irishtimes.com]. To celebrate the event, we have composed an ode to the number 100.
ThatsMaths 