20% of staff at the University of Essex, including 40% of its Maths, Stats and Actuarial Science School are being laid off. Please, sign this petition to stop it and share widely.
The main Fediverse mathematics hub that I'm aware of is Mathstodon, a Mastodon server. Caveat: There may be many others I'm not aware of.
That said, it's supposed to be for people who live, breathe and work in mathematics, so it might not be the best instance for an amateur.
I have seen more amateur stuff (in both positive and negative senses) under #math and similar hashtags on Mastodon though. Much of that isn't from Mathstodon.
Twelve years. I started this project twelve years ago, and today I hold the result in my hand. It’s a book that combines bead weaving with math called, “Beading with Algorithms: Cellular Automata in Peyote Stitch.” With help from mathematician and artist Roger Antonsen, graphic designer Zelda Lin, a handful of talented proof readers, and the good people from World Scientific Publishing Company, my dream of combining my loves of math, art, and teaching into a book is finally a reality.
This book is the first of its kind, a recipe book of algorithms that can be used and combined to generate colorful patterns in peyote stitch beadwork in any size and shape you desire. These algorithms could also be applied to other pixelated art forms like tile laying, embroidery, crochet, and quilts. We included projects like bracelets, pill pouches, pendants, beaded beads, and key chains. We also included a bunch of different grids that you can photocopy and color with markers.
Of course I’m biased, but I think it’s a really beautiful book. We included multiple colorful images on almost every page, 172 pages in all. It was a huge layout challenge, but Zelda nailed it. My original goal was to write 128 pages on how to use algorithms to make beaded jewelry, but the more we explored the space, the more we found. Not just millions of algorithms, the space of possibilities is infinite. So of course, we couldn’t include them all. But we used math and Roger’s custom software that he wrote for this project to help us find dozens of the easiest algorithms and more than a hundred more in increasing levels of complexity. We included all of our favorites. 1/2
There is much truth to this post about about #math textbooks.
Screenshot of a post by cauchys-special-boy:
if there's one thing ive learned from my math education it's the ability to judge a textbook by it's cover:
fancy cover with actual picture, fewer than 15 years old, $300: absolute dogshit. time wasting exercises, poor exposition, that weird gloss they put on the pages probably makes it too toxic to use as kindling
title is just name of subject, referred to by author, 50 years old with like 3 editions: excellent. compact proofs, exercises good enough people refer to them by number in conversation. available for free by foraging somewhere they grow naturally
title is some shit like paul's notes, "cover" is just default latex titlepage, distributed as pdf to grad classes or by advisor: best coverage of whatever (usually niche) topic it's about in the world. crystal clear exposition. solutions to exercises available by emailing grad students working under author
Meme of a toucan. On the top panel its long beak labelled "M9999971879: is 2 to the power of 9999971879 minus 1, has 3010291492 decimal digits, and takes 2905663.125 GHz-Days to do one PRP (probable prime) test.
The bottom panel has a hand pulling away the long beak to reveal the toucan has a tiny human face underneath it, revealing it's divisible by the 11-digit number 19999943759 with a k value of 1.
(Context: For Mersenne numbers, which are of the form 2 to the power of p minus 1 where p is prime, if a Mersenne number composite, their factors will always take the form 2 times k times p minus 1. In this example, this really huge Mersenne number with over 3 billion digits only has an 11 digit factor because its k value is 1, in other words it's only double the p exponent plus 1, saving thousands of years of computation to do a more intensive probable prime test on it.)
Just published "Random distributions in programming and video games," in which I take unnecessary shots at D&D, XCOM 2, roguelike video games, and pseudorandom number generators in general.
Wow, what an awesome, challenging and time consuming prompt.
Starting with the ellipse for the head and the eyes it began to make a lot of fun. So, I added this and that. And more and more detail.
The hair was the most difficult part. By hand it's just some fast strokes but with code it was a challenge. But I stopped here.
One of its standout features is #Maxima (but also #Python, #R etc.) integration—you can create #notebooks that combine text, #LaTeX, Maxima commands, and plots, making it easy to produce scientific documents with live calculations and results.
realhats v7.1 by Matthew W. Scroggs & Adam K. Townsend
realhats is a package for LATEX that makes the \hat command put real hats on
symbols.
he command \hat will choose a hat randomly from eighteen hats:
a beret
a Santa hat
a sombrero
a witch’s hat
a top hat
a Ash’s hat
a fez
a cowboy hat
a crown
a D dunce’s cap
a policeman’s hat
a Scottish hat
a birthday hat
a mortarboard
a aperiodic tile (white)
a aperiodic tile (gray)
a aperiodic tile (light blue)
a aperiodic tile (blue)
Over the course of 2022-23, I accumulated several dozen 3D-printed (selective laser sintered nylon) prototypes for jewelry: Spheres banded by loxodromes, cyclides diagonally banded by images of great circles in the 3-sphere, annular portions of minimal surfaces and singular complex-algebraic space curves, and a few miscellanea. Here they are as ornaments for a holiday tree in anticipation of the solstice.
📐✂️ Turn eight paper squares into a rotating kaleidoscope toy with this 3-minute #origami#tutorial. Each piece follows identical folds – triangles, center points, heart shapes – then connects into an accordion that expands and collapses as you manipulate it.
No sarcasm in this. However is there like a ask math community? Something similar to this?