Monthly Archives: October 2012

MODA: Barycentric stuff

Posted on October 15, 2012 by apgoucher

Yes, there’s another draft chapter of MODA online. Before we get to that, however, here is a picture sent in by arguably the greatest fan of cp4space: You may remember Vishal from the games of Hackenbush he played against his adversary, … Continue reading →

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Campanology

Posted on October 14, 2012 by apgoucher

It is usual, in Cambridge, to hear a plethora of bells chiming. Being within hearing range of the chapels of both Trinity and King’s college, I am greeted with clocks chiming every quarter-hour. On Sunday mornings, however, someone plays the entire full peal … Continue reading →

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Spinning around

Posted on October 12, 2012 by apgoucher

The Ready gang have been doing more experiments lately, and I ought to summarise the recent discoveries in reaction-diffusion systems. You may remember Robert Munafo’s ‘U-skate’ configuration, which propagates through space even when bombarded with radiation: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sir7yMLvIo] Well, lately Tim Hutton … Continue reading →

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Projective polyhedra

Posted on October 11, 2012 by apgoucher

The Platonic solids can be regarded as regular tilings of the surface of a sphere in much the same way as the square, hexagonal and triangular tilings of the plane are regular. For example, the dodecahedron is a tiling of … Continue reading →

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Antikythera revisited

Posted on October 8, 2012 by apgoucher

Emma McCaughan notified me that topic of the 2012 Larmor Lecture organised by the Cambridge Philosophical Society is the Antikythera mechanism. It takes place at 5:30 pm today (Monday 8th October) in the Bristol-Myers Squibb lecture theatre, located on Lensfield … Continue reading →

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MODA: Geometry bashing

Posted on October 8, 2012 by apgoucher

A tried and tested technique for attacking geometry problems is ‘bashing’ them with an algebraic approach. We’ve already seen how projective geometry can be based around a coordinate system (giving rise to areal and projective Cartesian coordinates as special cases). Two-dimensional Cartesian coordinates … Continue reading →

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Combinatorial game theory

Posted on October 6, 2012 by apgoucher

Dating the discovery of the integers is difficult indeed. Positive integers have been used since time immemorial for counting, and positive rationals were later used by the Ancient Greeks to express lengths. However, this was not sufficient, as the Pythagorean … Continue reading →

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A slice of π

Posted on October 3, 2012 by apgoucher

If I were more diligent and could actually be bothered to tag and categorise my blog posts, this one would belong in the esoteric realm of ‘probabilistic geometry’. Suppose we have three variables, X, Y and Z, which are independent and random, determined … Continue reading →

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MODA: Projective geometry

Posted on October 1, 2012 by apgoucher

(This is a pre-recorded message scheduled to automatically publish on the 1st October. If you’re reading this, I’m in Cambridge, probably either very busy with work, or very inebriated, or both. Here’s an emoticon which is also valid punctuation in this … Continue reading →

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