A beautiful landscape painting, a beautiful piano sonata -- art and music are almost exclusively described in terms of aesthetics, but what about math? Beyond useful or brilliant, can an abstract idea be considered beautiful? Yes, actually -- and not... Continue Reading →
Most of us know this phenomenon only too well: as soon as it is hot outside, you get an appetite for a cooling ice cream. But would you have thought that mathematics could be involved? Let us explain: The rising... Continue Reading →
The Borromean rings, also called the Borromean links are three mutually interlocked rings, named after the Italian Renaissance family who used them on their coat of arms. The configuration of rings is also known as a "Ballantine," and a brand... Continue Reading →
Einstein was born, Hawking passes away and it’s Pi day… What is Pi? Understanding pi is as easy as counting to one, two, 3.1415926535… OK, we'll be here for a while if we keep that up. Here's what's important: Pi... Continue Reading →
For a cyclic quadrilateral, the sum of the products of the two pairs of opposite sides equals the product of the diagonals. We have three colored segment in this animation. Surprisingly the length of the longest one is always the sum... Continue Reading →
In numerical analysis, Newton's method (also known as the Newton–Raphson method), named after Isaac Newton and Joseph Raphson, is a method for finding successively better approximations to the roots (or zeroes) of a real-valued function. The idea of the method is as follows: one starts with an initial guess which is... Continue Reading →
In geometry, an envelope of a family of curves in the plane is a curve that is tangent to each member of the family at some point, and these points of tangency together form the whole envelope. Classically, a point on the envelope can be thought of as the... Continue Reading →
