Author Archives: Brent

Workshop on Functional Art, Music, Modeling and Design

Posted on May 13, 2013

Wearing my PhD-student hat, I’m helping organize a workshop, FARM, to be held in Boston this September. I thought it worth mentioning since some readers of this blog—especially those interested in the intersection of math, art, and programming—may find it … Continue reading →

Posted in meta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Making connections

Posted on April 20, 2013

Here’s something fun I was playing around with today. I generated 100 random points and connected some of them with lines. Can you figure out how I chose which lines to draw? How about these? (Same points, different lines.) Or … Continue reading →

Posted in challenges, geometry | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

Animated Sieve of Eratosthenes

Posted on April 11, 2013

Here’s something I made yesterday! (Note, I strongly suggest watching it fullscreen, in HD if you have the bandwidth for it.) Can you figure out what’s going on? The source code for the animation is here; I was inspired by … Continue reading →

Posted in arithmetic, counting, pattern, pictures, primes, video | Tagged , , , , | 11 Comments

Stars of the Mind’s Sky with Diagrams

Posted on April 6, 2013

A few weeks ago, Paul Salomon posted a really beautiful work of mathematical art on his blog, Lost In Recursion: Stars of the Mind’s Sky, by Paul Salomon He included a precise mathematical description of the image, and I naturally … Continue reading →

Posted in geometry, group theory, pictures, programming | Tagged , , , , , | 9 Comments

Book review: Guesstimation 2.0

Posted on March 30, 2013

Guesstimation 2.0: Solving Today’s Problems on the Back of a NapkinLawrence Weinstein I got a review copy of this book, and initially decided I wasn’t going to review it—I hate those sorts of consulting-company-interview estimation problems, you know, like “what … Continue reading →

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Diagrams!

Posted on March 27, 2013

Over the past few years I’ve written quite a few posts with images generated by a library I (now along with many others) wrote. Most famously, this is how I created those factorization diagrams. But I’ve used it in many … Continue reading →

Posted in links, pictures, programming | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Penrose tiles on my refrigerator!

Posted on March 8, 2013

I got some Penrose refrigerator magnets in the mail the other day! They look nice on my fridge, don’t you think? Here’s a close-up: (Unfortunately, since this was just a Kickstarter project there’s no way to order more at this … Continue reading →

Posted in geometry, pattern, pictures | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Book review: Lauren Ipsum

Posted on February 9, 2013

Lauren Ipsumstory by Carlos Bueno; illustrations by Ytaelena López I don’t quite remember how I first stumbled across the website for this little gem of a book, billing itself as “a story about computer science and other improbable things”. But … Continue reading →

Posted in books, computation, review, teaching | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Factorization diagram cards: help?

Posted on February 5, 2013

The other day I got a lovely email from Malke Rosenfeld thanking me for creating factorization diagrams and linking me to her blog post about “factor dominoes”: she printed out some factorization diagrams, glued them to cardstock, and used the … Continue reading →

Posted in arithmetic, pictures, primes | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

New “Chaos” videos from the makers of “Dimensions”

Posted on January 28, 2013

I just got an email from Jos Leys, one of the creators of the Dimensions video series (which I wrote about previously), announcing that they have released another video series, this time about Chaos, at http://www.chaos-math.org/en. I haven’t had a … Continue reading →

Posted in links, video | Tagged , | 6 Comments