The Art of Mathematics

Alon Amit addresses the various facets of mathematics. Is it an art or a science? Both? Neither? Is it invented or discovered? Why is math that's developed for purely aesthetic reasons so often a useful tool for the...

Alon Amit, prolific Quora math answerer, discusses how Artificial Intelligence might change the role of the mathematician. AI will make mathematics more efficient but it can't do math in a deep sense at present. It...

Cindy Lawrence is the Director and CEO of the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City. She and a former math professor built it up from a grass-roots museum started by math teachers. The Museum, soon to move...

Veselin Jungic, teaching professor of mathematics at Simon Fraser University, introduces undergraduate math minors to contemporary math research. The focus is Ramsey theory, an area of current research activity that...

Joseph Bennish discusses math as a "concept factory." The concept of prime numbers came from a desire to break numbers down to their simplest atoms. This simple concept led to simple questions like the twin prime...

Jeanne Lazzarini tells us how a clockmaker used an egg to win the competition to build the dome of the Florence Cathedral. The Cathedral had had a huge gaping hole for a hundred years since no one knew how to build such...

Math is in a sense the science of patterns. Alon Amit explores the question of what exactly is a pattern. A common example is the decimal digits of pi. The statement that they have no pattern seems to be either obvious...

Alon Amit joins us on the antipode of Pi Day to counter the myths and mysteries of this most famous irrational number. There's nothing magical about a non-repeating string of digits. The real and profound mystery is the...

Kate Pearce, a post-doc researcher at UT Austin, talks about her experience teaching math in a women's prison. Her remedial college algebra students came in with negative experience in math, so she devised ways to make...

Alon Amit, prolific Quora math answerer, argues that an honest representation of mathematical ideas is enough to spark interest in math. It's not necessary to exaggerate the role of math; the golden ratio does not drive...

Dave Cole, the author of the Math Kids series of books, talks about introducing kids to math as a fun challenge and puzzle beyond the rote memorization they've come to expect. Kids who like to read are enticed by...

Neil Epstein, Associate Professor of Mathematics at George Mason University, introduces us to the fractions used by the ancient Egyptians, well before the Greeks and Romans. The Egyptian fractions all had a unit...

Jeanne Lazzarini joins us again to introduce us to the mathematician Luca Pacioli, whose views of numbers and shapes influenced Leonardo da Vinci, leading to a period of art and invention. His book, De Divina...

Alon Amit, probably the most prolific answerer of math questions on Quora, shares his reasons for his deep involvement. He seeks to share the journey, the exploration and stumbles of solving a problem. He's especially...

Lee Kraftchick continues his tour of books about math written for the non-mathematician like himself. We also can't let go of Gödel Escher Bach. Lee cites an opinion piece in the Washington Post, titled, "The Problem...

Lee Kraftchick discusses some of his favorite books for non-mathematicians to explore the breadth of mathematics. These books range from very old to current. Some discuss beautiful proofs, whether math is invented or...

Jeanne Lazzarini talks about kaleidoscopes and the mathematics that makes them work. This "beautiful form watcher" uses the laws of reflection to make ever-changing repeated symmetries. The use of more mirrors...

Ethan Zhao and Edward Yu are the winners in mathematics of the prestigious Davidson Fellow Scholarships, awarded based on projects completed by students under 18. Ethan's project was on learning models and Edward's was...

Lawyer Lee Kraftchick discusses the search for truth and basic principles in the legal community and the surprising parallels and similarities with the same search in the math community. Mathematical and legal arguments...

Lee Kraftchick, a lawyer with a math degree, discusses some of the surprising parallels between the fields. Math is used directly to make statistical arguments to rule out random chance as a cause. He gives examples...

Jeanne Lazzarini looks for math in the real world and finds the Fibonacci sequence and the closely related Golden Ratio. These appear as we examine plants, bees, rabbits, flowers, fruit, and the human body. These...

Brian Katz, from California State University Long Beach, invites us to explore the various layers of ordinary sounds, informed by a little calculus. The limited frequencies that come out of the wave equation are what...

Jeanne Lazzarini, who has visited us before to talk about tessellations, discusses a new mathematical discovery that even earned a mention on Jimmy Kimmel. It's a shape that can be used to fill the plane with no gaps...

Lawrence Udeigwe, associate professor of mathematics at Manhattan College and an MLK Visiting Associate Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, is both a mathematician and a musician. We discuss his recent...

Joseph Bennish returns to dig into the math behind the Fourier Analysis we discussed last time. Specifically, it allows us to express any function in terms of sines and cosines. Fourier analysis appears in nature--our...