Category Archives: Uncategorized

In January 2000, Erich Friedman considered the problem of finding a rigid unit-distance graph G containing a regular heptagon as a subgraph. That is to say, the graph is immersed in the plane such that: every edge of G must … Continue reading →

There’s a very elegant cryptographic construction discovered by Barreto and Naehrig in a 2005 paper. It is beautiful from a pure mathematical perspective, but also has an impressive application: it was* part of the ingenious mechanism by which Zcash supports … Continue reading →

Recall that the logarithm function (defined on the punctured complex plane) is multi-valued, with the different solutions to exp(x) = y differing by integer multiples of 2πi.   James Propp remarked that the values of the form i^i^i are a … Continue reading →

For any nonnegative integer n, there exists the highly symmetric Barnes-Wall lattice in dimension . In low dimensions, these are (up to scaling and rotation) familiar lattices: For n = 0, this is just the integer lattice, . For n … Continue reading →

We say that a regular n-dimensional polytope P subsumes a regular n-dimensional polytope Q if the vertex-set of Q is geometrically similar to a subset of the vertex-set of P. For instance, the dodecahedron subsumes a cube (the convex hull … Continue reading →

In June of this year, I read Paul Graham’s essay on names. The author (whom you may know from his book On Lisp) begins with the following advice: If you have a US startup called X and you don’t have … Continue reading →