Fractal patterns in the Abelian sandpile. Credit: Moritz Lang The so-called Abelian sandpile model has been studied by scientists for more than 30 years to better understand a physical phenomenon called self-organized criticality, which appears in many real-life situations such as the coordinated firing of brain cells, the spread of forest fires, the distribution of…
Today’s puzzles come from Alain Nicolas, a Frenchman who has been called the world’s finest artist of Escher-style tilings. (That’s to say, tilings with no gaps or overlaps in which each tile is in the shape of a living creature, as pioneered in the 1930s and 1940s by the Dutch artist MC Escher). In each…
“I used to think boys were just better at maths,” said Linah. “But now, it’s like, we go to the same school, we do the same subjects – so if you can do it, I can do it.” There’s a reason for the renewed confidence in the 15-year-old from Dagenham and it’s sitting next to…
Earlier today I set you the following three problems. Solution: 64 If we call the ‘size’ of a triangle the number of individual areas it contains, there are 7 triangles of size 1 14 triangles of size 2 10 triangles of size 3 13 triangles of size 4 6 triangles of size 6 6 triangles…
Today, three puzzles from Mathigon, a remarkable maths website (about which more later). An easy one to start. Count the number of triangles in the image below. all illustrations ©Mathigon Careful though! It’s always easy to miss a few. Talking of (and walking on) triangles…here’s a probability question about random ants. Finally, a very nice…
A RUDN Mathematician Calculated Wave Velocity for Post-Stroke Therapy. Credit: Natalia Deryugina A RUDN mathematician calculated the velocity of wave propagation in the brain in the course of external stimulation. This procedure is used to treat stroke patients. To do so, the scientists generally formulated the task by creating a reaction-diffusion equation and carried out…
Figure 1. A male Japanese tree frog that produces the type of call examined in this study. Credit: Osaka University If you’ve ever camped by a pond, you know frogs make a racket at night; but what you might not know is how functional and regulated their choruses really are. Frogs communicate with sound, and…
As long as a free end gets stuck on something, and some force from moving water or struggling fish pulls in the opposite direction, tiny skeins of thread produced by hagfish can unspool fast enough to make an enormous amount of protective slime. Credit: Jean-Luc Thiffeault Hundreds of meters deep in the dark of the…
The last time I met Michael Atiyah, who has died aged 89, was at Tate Modern in London; not the most likely place to run into probably Britain’s greatest mathematician since Isaac Newton, but entirely consistent with his wide-ranging enthusiasm for his subject. It was June 2012, and I joined him and the flamboyant French…
Earlier today I set you the following five geometrical puzzles by Catriona Shearer. I hope you discovered the clever way of solving them, without recourse to pages of algebra. 1. Orange segments If the radius of each semicircle is 5, what’s the total shaded area? all illustrations © Catriona Shearer Solution: 100. If you rearrange…