Vi Hart finishes up her three-parter on Spirals, Fibonacci, and being a plant: part 1, part 2, and part 3. Great stuff.

Vi Hart’s awesome series on Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant: part 1 and part 2. Can’t wait for part 3! I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say this changes the way I look at the world.

Cool, Khan Academy hired Vi Hart! Like peanut butter and chocolate.

Vi Hart’s What is up with Noises? (The Science and Mathematics of Sound, Frequency, and Pitch). Khan Academy should hire her.

The always interesting and entertaining Vi Hart: Pi Is (still) Wrong.

Vi Hart’s Mathematical Doodling videos are fantastic, I’m not sure which one is my favorite. Maybe Snakes and Graphs:

(via waxy)

A meeting of mathemagical tricksters:

Gary Foshee, a collector and designer of puzzles from Issaquah near Seattle walked to the lectern to present his talk. It consisted of the following three sentences: “I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys?”

The event was the Gathering for Gardner earlier this year, a convention held every two years in Atlanta, Georgia, uniting mathematicians, magicians and puzzle enthusiasts. The audience was silent as they pondered the question.

“The first thing you think is ‘What has Tuesday got to do with it?’” said Foshee, deadpan. “Well, it has everything to do with it.” And then he stepped down from the stage.

I haven’t read the rest yet because I want to puzzle over it awhile longer. (via kottke)

Steven Strogatz wraps up his marvelous From Fish to Infinity math series with, appropriately, a piece on infinity, where he tackles a mind-bender: some infinities are bigger than others. So sorry to see this series end, but the columns will reappear with additional material in book form in 2012! Until then, here’s the whole collection:

• From Fish to Infinity (Jan. 31, 2010)
• Rock Groups (Feb. 7, 2010)
• The Enemy of My Enemy (Feb. 14, 2010)
• Division and Its Discontents (Feb. 21, 2010)
• The Joy of X (Feb. 28, 2010)
• Finding Your Roots (March 7, 2010)
• Square Dancing (March 14, 2010)
• Think Globally (March 21, 2010)
• Power Tools (March 28, 2010)
• Take It to the Limit (April 4, 2010)
• Change We Can Believe In (April 11, 2010)
• It Slices, It Dices (April 18, 2010)
• Chances Are (April 25, 2010)
• Group Think (May 2, 2010)
• The Hilbert Hotel (May 9, 2010)

Sorry, can’t help myself, Strogatz again, this time on getting to pi via infinity (breaking into calculus now).

Beautifully done: Nature by Numbers.

Steven Strogatz’s series on math started off great and keeps getting better and better. His is the first explanation of imaginary numbers that I can fully relate to and understand. And not just on an abstract level; this is also the first time the real-world application has been apparent to me.

I think Steven Strogatz’s article on division is the best of his excellent “introduction to math” series so far. His series has quickly become one of my favorite reads on the web.

Really looking forward to watching Steven Strogatz’s math series unfold:

Crazy as it sounds, over the next several weeks I’m going to try to do something close to that. I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

So, let’s begin with pre-school…

He then cites a Sesame Street video. Good man.

P.S. If you want to subscribe to just Strogatz’s stuff, I couldn’t find a separate author feed at the NYT, so I created a Yahoo pipe of his posts.

How cool is it that Wired has stories up on Archimedes and Eureqa [sic]. That can’t be a coincidence, can it?

The former is a sophisticated computer model that simulates human drug trails with uncanny accuracy. In 2004 they ran it and compared it against the actual human trials for the same drug and were remarkably (but not perfectly) accurate. How? It is a…

soup-to-nuts model that captures everything known by modern medicine, from the evolution of disease in different people — as shaped by factors like race, genetic risk, and number of hours spent doing yoga — to specific physiological details, such as the amount of heart muscle that dies in the hours after a heart attack and the degree to which medications like aspirin can limit that damage.

Eureqa sounds even cooler: it is a program that takes in raw data, and proposes scientific laws to explain said data. For example, it can extrapolate the laws of motion from data representing a pendulum’s swing. It took hours for it to discover what took Newton years (not to mention everybody who came before him). Oh, and it’s a free download if there’s a scientific law you’ve been struggling to discover. Be prepared, though:

“We’ve seen this in the lab. Eureqa finds a new relationship. It’s predictive, it’s elegant, it has to be true. But we have no idea what it means.”

Jon Udell puts his Kill-a-Watt and Wolfram|Alpha to good use, to express his electricity usage in more relatable terms.

Behold the Mandelbulb, a dazzling stab at a 3D Mandelbrot (I will take the author’s word for it that this isn’t quite the real deal):

Check out some of the variations you can get by tweaking the formula. You can buy a print via deviantART.

Here’s my internal monologue upon reviewing the cool new Mathematica Image Processing features:

“Wow, that’s really cool, I can’t believe only a few lines of code can take a goose video and animate it. Very impressive. I’d like to play with that. I wonder how much it costs… Oof. $2,500. Let me see, I don’t have Mathematica, but lets calculate what percentage of my salary that is… Rats.”

Looks like I’ll stick with SpeedCrunch for now.