Craig Kaplan - Parquet Deformations: the tiles, they are a-changin - CoM Apr 2021 G4G Celebration 2026-09-18 | Craig Kaplan - Parquet Deformations: the tiles, they are a-changin - CoM Apr 2021
Tom Bessoir - Digits of Pi Film - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-11-18 | Tom Bessoir & Joshua Pines 2019length 03:14A transcendental film!Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's “Anemic Cinema,” I set out to create a film composed within a circular frame. This circular composition led directly to using the number pi for the underlying structure.Having the digits of pi sung on the soundtrack is an homage to “Einstein on the Beach” by Philip Glass.www.TomBessoir.com
Sarah Hart - The Mathematics of Musical Composition - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-11-15 | The Mathematics of Musical CompositionPattern and structure are essential to music, from the permutations in a Bach fugue, to the structure of a round. This lecture will explore the mathematics of musical symmetries, such as the “translational symmetry” of the transposition of keys, and the “rotational symmetry” of the duet “Der Spiegel”, attributed to Mozart. It will go on to explore the last century’s experimentation with the conscious use of mathematical concepts, including magic squares, fractals, and probability theory, to produce new and intriguing effects.
Colin Wright - Incircles of Primitive Pythagorean Triangles - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-11-13 | Recently someone pointed out to me an interesting fact about incircles of Pythagorean Triangles, which was nice, but not too deep. Then I got a surprise.
Tiago Hirth - Sphinx Revue Mensuelle des Questions Récréatives an Overview - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-11-11 | At G4G14 Maurice Kraïtchik and his two international conferences on Recreational Mathematics were introduced. The Sphinx Journal which ran from 1930-39 which tied it all together will be the emphasis of this presentation showcasing some more information on the RM scene in between world wars' europe.
Sabetta Matsumoto - Bending Seams — How to Create Couture Curves - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-11-08 | Seams not only hold clothes together but also give them some of their 3D geometric shape. In this work, we take seams in flat scarves and bend them so that the resulting scarf has negative curvature. We also discuss the methods and materials used for constructing versions in both wool and polyester.
Bjoern Muetzel - Apollonian Dream - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-11-06 | Water drops fall into a lake and create ripples. For a fleeting moment these rings show an Apollonian gasket. The corresponding video was created using the 3D software Blender.https://natsci.eckerd.edu/~muetzeb@campus/gallery.php
Spandan Bandyopadhyay - The Egg Sandwich Problem - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-11-04 | A silly story of yet another breakfast with my family interrupted because I wanted to divide an egg sandwich equally. Followed by some interesting mathematical consequences and the physical consequence of my piece of egg sandwich getting cold.
George Hart - Abraham Sharp and the Sharpohedron - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-11-01 | The British scientific instrument maker Abraham Sharp (1653–1742) is known for his calculation (circa 1700) of Pi to 72 decimal digits. But a greater accomplishment was his 1717 book _Geometry Improv’d_ with detailed mathematical calculations, handmade copperplate engravings, and practical instructions explaining how to slice twelve original polyhedra from solid blocks of wood.www.georgehart.com/sharp
Tanya Khovanova - My Favorite Math Jokes - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-10-30 | I've been collecting math jokes for many years. I will talk about some of my favorite ones.
Robin Houston - Polyhedra Whose Faces Meet at Right-Angles Except on One Edge - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-10-28 | A brief explanation of the mathematical lore that lies behind the curious polyhedron.
Scott Vorthmann - The Virtual Fifty-Nine Icosahedra - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-10-25 | I describe an online version of Bob Hearn's Magnetic Fifty-Nine Icosahedra model, freely available for all.Application URL: http://tinyurl.com/59icosas
Bob Hearn - The Magnetic Fifty-Nine Icosahedra - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-10-23 | Coxeter et al.'s book "The 59 Icosahedra" describes all of the possible stellations of the regular icosahedron. Paper models exist in mathematics museums. I describe a magnetic kit, consisting of 413 pieces, whereby one can construct any of the stellations. The set will be available to play with in the exhibit room.
Amina Buhler-Allen - Hyperspace Heroes 1: Odd Bedfellows - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-10-18 | An 'Aha' moment, in an instant can yield new discoveries from seemingly unrelated ideas and events.A high school burns down. Classes are held at the local library. Marc Pelletier finds 2 unrelated books: 'Regular Polytopes' and the 'Zome Primer'. Set on fire by their unexpected interconnections, Marc begins a lifetIme journey, hitchhiking from New Hampshire to New Mexico, barefoot....
Chaim Goodman-Strauss - The Hat in The World - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-10-16 | Dave Smith's discovery of the "Hat" aperiodic monotile last year stimulated many people to make the shape their own, with cookies, clothes, artwork, games, puzzles, tattoos, along with many stranger Hat-styled things, and in the fall, United Kingdom Mathematics Trust and MoMath sponsored a contest to recognize some of the best of these. We will show and share.
Eric Bates - Passing the Spark - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-10-14 | Why do some people seem so natural on camera, while the rest of us feel awkward and inarticulate? This talk delves into the art of speaking to a camera and sharing your skills online, revealing the truth behind the lens- a well produced video is often anything but "natural".Eric Bates is a filmmaker and professional circus artist. See more: @ericbatesimages or @cigarboxjuggler
John Winston Garth - Cellular Auto-mon - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-10-11 | Cellular Auto-mon are discoverable creatures in the realm of mathematics. Here's what they are and how to find them. conwaylife.com
Carolyn Yackel - Depicting Catalan Solids on Temari Balls - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-10-09 | We discuss the project of depicting Catalan solids on temari balls. This includes projecting the wireframe of the Catalan onto a not quite ideal sphere in the real world and considering the best embroidery methods to bring a naive viewer into conversation with the mathematics. This work originated as part of the Mathemalchemy project.
Roy Leban - Markov Algorithms and Life - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-10-07 | A Markov Algorithm is a deterministic string manipulation and rewriting system invented by Andrey Markov, Jr. Simple in form, fairly human readable, and Turing complete, they are an interesting way to think about algorithms. My innovation is Cellular Markov Algorithms, which allow visual algorithms for cellular automatons, logic puzzles, and … for G4G … Conway's Game of Life. royleban.com/markov
Tom Rokicki - The Speed of Light in the Game of Life - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-10-04 | If a life pattern exists strictly in the lower left quadrant of the plane, what's the earliest generation for which cell (x,y) can be set? Knuth poses this question in section 7.2.2.2, exercises 82-84 of The Art of Computer Programming. We show how Knuth's bound can be attained for part of the space.
David Michael Greene - How Many Gliders Do You Really Need? - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-10-02 | In November 2022, an intercontinental collaboration of Lifenthusiasts proved a surprising new result.If a Conway's Life pattern can be created by colliding any number of gliders... a thousand gliders, a million, any number... then that exact same Life pattern can also be created starting with a very small fixed number of gliders -- exactly 15 gliders, in fact.conwaylife.com/wiki/RCT
Alvy Ray Smith - What Do the Theory of Computing and the Movies have in Common? - G4G15 Feb 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-09-30 | What Do the Theory of Computing and the Movies Have in Common?What does theoretical computer science have to do with art and the movies? Alvy RaySmith, who has done it all, tells that story. Born before computers and pixels, he has riddenthe Moore’s law supernova wave all the way from the first pixels to the first digital movie,Toy Story, from Pixar, the company he cofounded. But before that, he was an oil painter inNew Mexico and then took a decade-long voyage through computation theory for his PhDwork and early professorhood. An encounter with Martin Gardner, a childhood hero of his,resulted in a cover of Scientific American which brought him an early fame of sorts and arequest to design the cover for the annual proceedings of the Symposium on Foundationsof Computer Science. That FOCS cover was used for 41 years! He executed it with pre-digital technology but uses it to explain the central dogma that drives much of moderncomputer graphics. Smith spent 10 years writing a book called A Biography of the Pixel, thesubject of his public talk, but this talk will focus on the Martin Gardner influence, having todo with the computation-theory crowd, long before Pixar and all that.
Jorge Nuno Silva - Lewis Carrolls Game of Logic - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-09-27 | The Game of Logic is the title of a book published by Lewis Carroll in 1886. In it he presents a board-game for (at least!) one player designed to perform logical deduction. We will describe it and comment on its relation with other systems of deduction known to Carroll, as Euler's Circles and Venn's Ellipses. What makes Lewis Carroll's invention a game?
Audrey Nasar - Symmetry Card Game - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-09-25 | This presentation will showcase "Symmetry," a deck of cards that can be used to teach rosette symmetry groups in a fun and interactive way. The cards were inspired by a geometry course for undergraduate students at FIT. In "Symmetry,” each card features a character interacting with an object, which can be classified according to the symmetry group it belongs to.For more information: mathinked.com
Jim Propp - Industrious Dice, or, Pip-Pip Hooray! - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-09-23 | I'll discuss dice that perform the same job as a standard die (generating a random number between 1 and 6) using just 7 pips rather than the usual 21, as well as other curious dice.
Jeanette Shakalli - FUNDAPROMAT: A Free Source for Math Enthusiasts - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-09-20 | The mission of the Panamanian Foundation for the Promotion of Mathematics (FUNDAPROMAT) is to change the world's perception so that one and all can experience mathematics as accessible, relevant and inherently joyous. In this talk, I will briefly introduce FUNDAPROMAT, summarize our efforts to spread the joy of mathematics and share how those who are interested can get involved.
Douglas McKenna - Fibbinary Zippers and Square-Filling Curve Motifs - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-09-19 | "Fibbinary Zippers, Frozen Wedding Cakes, & Self-Avoiding, Hilbert-style, Square-Filling Curve Motifs" Self-avoiding, order-n, Hilbert-style, square-filling curve approximations are toroidal Hamiltonian paths of two types. The lesser known type have boundaries governed by Fibbinary (“Fibonacci binary”) zipper modes that emanate enumeration-enabling constraint into the square subdivision's interior. The number of such modes for the order-n square subdivision is the Fibonacci number F( (n – 3) / 2).
John Harris - Puzzle Variations from a Rod Bentley Text - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-09-18 | In this talk, we will introduce three variations of puzzles inspired by a Rod Bentley text. The puzzles involve numbers, colors, and symbols, and they are also related to puzzles by Dr. Bette Oxle and T. Dexter Lobe. While each has a slightly different look, the overall theme is the same --- and likely familiar to those paying close attention (and thinking outside the BOX).
Bill Cheswick - Paul Erdos Brain was in Town - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-09-16 | Paul Erdos left his coat at Bell Labs after one of his many visits to Ron Graham. I have it with me, and propose a new, imaginary portion of the Erdos number.
Eleftherios Pavlides - Polymorphic Elastegrity (PE) - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-09-13 | Polymorphic Elastegrity (PE): From Recreational Paper Folding to the Tree of PolymorphismsThe PE originated from art assignments based on Josef and Annie Gropius Bauhaus's Design Theories. We will examine how the PE was discovered through art processes and show how further folding gives rise to 15 polymorphisms: the 5 regular solids at various scales, objects symmetrically to the 6, 12, and 60 bar tensegrity, the transformation from the 2D cube to 3D, to 4D and other novel shapes.
Robert Pope Vermillion - The Impossomatic 3000.1 - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-09-11 | A ridiculous exercise in asininity with an impossible machine, questionable mathematics, dodgy science, and general mayhem in large measure. Really though it's a comedy performance with gags aplenty for every aficionado of math, science, and all things weird, wacky, and, I hope, funny and memorable.
Inna Zakharevich - Computing with Paper - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-09-09 | What do you need in order to build a computer? It turns out that any computer program running on any input can be modeled using Conway's Game of Life: a simple two-dimensional grid of points that turn black or white based on simple rules. In this talk we'll talk about another way of modeling such a computer, using origami: just like Life, it turns out that paper folding flat can model computation.
Thomas Draper - Monoidal Categories for Modelling Physical Systems and Language - G4G15 Feb 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-09-06 | Physical systems and operations can be modeled with string diagrams. Language with word combination follows a similar structure. Category theory makes this correspondence explicit, as string diagrams represent morphisms in monoidal categories. By this correspondence, word meanings interact in the same way physical systems do.For more information, see Coecke's work: arxiv.org/abs/1003.4394
Eliza Gallagher & Neil Calkin-9x9 Project: Building Math Identity One Digit at a Time-G4G15 Feb 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-08-30 | We're working to get kids hooked on math puzzles! We'll talk a bit about the current state of the project and how others can join the network. We're actively looking for collaborators who work with youth ages 9-16 in both formal and informal learning spaces.
Haoran Chen - The Great Beetle Escape - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-08-28 | There is a beetle at each lattice point in the first quadrant of the plane, except for a triangular region including the origin at the lower left corner. The goal is to send any beetle, through a sequence of horizontal or vertical checker jumps, to the origin. We apply the invariant method to show the beetle escape is possible if the width of the triangle is less than or equal to 6.
Raymond Hall - The Magic Octagon - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-08-26 | The Magic Octagon: brain teaser, magic trick, and a mathematical "discrepant event" teaching tool. This talk will explore the history, math, and some preliminary findings from cognitive psychology research on this famous illusion involving three rotations.@physicsfun on Instagram
Robert Fathauer - Fractal-limit Tilings - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-08-21 | Constructs dubbed “fractal-limit tilings” (fl-tilings) are explored. These are formed by starting with a simple polygon, or in some cases a fractal prototile, and then strictly applying an iterative construction rule for subsequent generations. The overall fl-tilings generally form simply-connected supertiles that can be extended in the opposite direction (with larger tiles) to cover the plane.
Alyssa Williams & Christian Scott - Learning to Solve and Set Variant Sudoku - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-08-19 | A year ago, we were introduced to the wonderful world of variant sudoku. When we first started solving, we didn't realize that puzzles like these are written by actual people, and couldn't imagine that we could write them ourselves. Join us as we talk about our journey in learning to solve and set variant sudoku, and learn how you could do it, too!
Braden Ganetsky - Bask3twork: Procedurally Generating Symmetric Celtic Knots - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-08-16 | "Bask3twork" is a program that procedurally generates Celtic knots in a square grid using any subset of D4 symmetry, that of a square, including no symmetry at all. The secret? A font! The font's glyphs can be mixed, matched, and assembled to your heart's content. However, instead of creating Celtic knots manually, we can sit back and watch Bask3twork generate infinite possibilities.
Vladimir Bulatov - SymSim: Creation of Natural Seamless Symmetric Patterns - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-08-14 | I've combined computer simulation of a natural patterns formation using non-linear partial differential equations with additional requirement - patterns must be symmetric.I present few interesting animated patterns obtained from the simulation of Gray-Scott reaction diffusion and complex Ginzburg-Landau equations.SymSim is an online application available at http://bulatov.org/symsim
David Richeson - How Much String to String a Cardioid? - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-08-12 | It is well known that it is possible to make a string art cardioid. Begin with n equally-spaced numbered nails in a circle, and run a piece of string from each nail k to 2k (modulo n). We get different designs by changing the multiplicative factor. In this presentation, we discuss the surprising answer to the question: How much string will we need?
Jim Weinrich - On Spinning and Toppling Coins -Did Martin Gardner change his mind? - G4G15 Feb 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-08-09 | When you spin a penny and let it fall, is there a bias toward heads or tails? Martin Gardner claimed over the years that there is a heads bias, or a tails bias, but didn't explain why he changed his mind. He consistently maintained that there was probably a slight bevel to the edges of pennies minted in the U.S. I've spun hundreds of pennies to show that he changed his mind for good reason.
Robert Bosch - Single-Line Drawings via Mathematical Optimization - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-08-07 | I will present two new methods for constructing single-line drawings. The first method is tile-based and requires the user to solve large-scale integer programming problems. The second method uses ideas from single-variable calculus.
Tantan Dai - Gateway to World Sudoku Championship - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-08-05 | What does a sudoku competition entail? What kind of sudokus do you see in a sudoku contest? How fast can a top solver solve a sudoku in a competition? What do team competitions look like for sudoku? In this talk, I will introduce the scene of competitive sudoku solving and share my experience competing in the World Sudoku Championship.
James Gardner - Growing up with Martin Gardner (2024) - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-08-02 | Jim Gardner (Martin’s son) will share memories and anecdotes about Martin Gardner. Like previous G4G presentations, expect some repetition and new facts/figures! There will also be time for some Q&A
Kenneth Brecher - Introducing the Mesmoid - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-07-31 | I have designed a new type of dynamical object: the "Mesmoid". It is a right circular cylinder with an eccentric circle cut out of it. Unlike a coin or a wheel, when rolled it moves back and forth instead of in one direction only. This is the latest object to join the family of objects I have designed including the PhiTOP, PiTOP, eTOP and iTOP all introduced in the past G4G events.
Yossi Elran - Recreational Math as a Beacon of Hope - G4G15 February 2024 G4G Celebration 2024-07-29 | Recreational Math as a Beacon of Hope: Empowering Youth and Healing Trauma Through Puzzles"Martin Gardner advocated the use of recreational math in math education. This talk explores its use in healing displaced children from the October 7 terror attacks on Southern Kibbutzim in Israel, through puzzle parties, and empowering Arab and Jewish kids in the North via a college course, changing their math attitudes. These initiatives showcase recreational math's power to heal and empower."
