Star Wars snowflakes

With winter upon us, it's time for for some of my favorite symmetrical art: paper snowflakes!

Anthony Herrera has a site with all kinds of awesome Star Wars snowflakes. You can download pdf files of the designs and cut them out yourself. (This give me all kinds of ideas for other designs...)

My 9-year old daughter and I just tried two of his designs. Here's our Yodas and X-wings.

Math of Vegetables on Schrödingers Katt

I was on TV last week, talking about the mathematics of vegetables on a popular science show called Schrödingers Katt. It airs on NRK, the national broadcasting service. We filmed in September and they had a pretty quick turnaround on production.

Here's the link if you'd like to see, it links directly to my segment. They also show me juggling throughout the closing credits. Juggling a pineapple, cabbage and cauliflower was no easy thing!

http://tv.nrk.no/serie/schrodingers-katt1/dmpv73003112/08-11-2012#t=21m3s

Factor Visualization

Stephen Von Worley has a lot of great data visualizations on his site, but this one struck me as especially cool: http://www.datapointed.net/visualizations/math/factorization/animated-diagrams/

Dots are added one at a time and they all reconfigure to make patterns which display all of the prime factors of the new number. 70 for example, is shown as 7 groups of dots in a regular heptagon arrangement. Each of the groups is 5 groups in a regular pentagon arrangement. And each of these 5 groups is a set of 3 dots in an equilateral triangle. 105 = 7 x 5 x 3. The 7, 5 and 3 are clearly visible. The animation is mezmorizing.

I did a series of screenshots and made this composite image of the integers 1-49.