Monday, September 16

Math

Bernard Morin developed glaucoma at an early age and was blind by the time he was six years old. Despite his inability to see, Morin went on to become a master topologist—a mathematician who studies the intrinsic properties of geometric forms in space—and earned renown for his visualization of an inside-out sphere. For sighted people, […]

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At the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Rome, in September of 1973, the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős approached his friend Richard Guy with a request. He said, “Guy, veel you have a coffee?” It cost a dollar, a small fortune to a professor of mathematics at the hinterland University of Calgary who was not much […]

The early 19th century golfer Harry Vardon was the Tiger Woods of his day, and not just because he had marital difficulties. He even had a biography written about him, which recounted, among other things, how he handled losing his first child and living with tuberculosis. But Vardon’s life would be more useful to sports […]

If you’ve ever tried to give yourself a haircut, you know just how hard it is to make something precisely symmetrical. We value symmetry so highly in part because it’s really hard to achieve. Here are five of the most symmetrical objects humans have ever crafted, and why they were so hard to make. Nautilus […]

Gryffindor and Slytherin are about to play their annual badminton match. The best players from each house are supposed to face off on court one, the second best on court two, and so on. Slytherin’s coach knows that Gryffindor will put their players on the right courts, in order of their skill, because Gryffindors are […]

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