watching the detectives

July 27, 2011 in Links

mathblogging.org’s weekly picks #22.

it won’t do you a bit of good to review math

July 25, 2011 in Cool Tricks

Consider a set of five objects. In fact, consider the “canonical” set of five objects: {0, 1, 2, 3, 4}. There are then ten ways to form pairs of these objects, as one sees from the following display: 04 03 02 01 14 13 12 24 23 34 . (Note that by “pairs”, I refer [...]

lectures without words: color-crayon geometry

July 18, 2011 in Graphics, Lectures Without Words

yesterday’s more verbose version.

desargues theorem for poets

July 17, 2011 in MathEdZine, Rambles

the MEdZ logo indicates where the ten lines of the desargues diagram fall. one has ten such lines. also ten points. each line can be considered as a set of three points; similarly each single *point* belongs to three *lines*. in fact, we have a “duality” here… theorems about points-and-lines remain true when the words [...]

executive summary

July 6, 2011 in Uncategorized

Photo 195, originally uploaded by vlorbik. a by-hand reduction of my desargues-space poster, with one less layer of redundancy (and the colors of the triangles reversed; also some cosmetic tweaks).

poster: desargues configuration

July 5, 2011 in Graphics, Lectures Without Words, Projective Spaces

ten poles, ten polars, and ten pairs-of-triangles: ten ways to use one drawing (from MathEdZine, of course) to illustrate one theorem. (desargues’ theorem at w’edia.) performing calculations using actual blobs of color rather than alphabetical symbols *standing* for colors is time-consuming (and demanding of special tools)… but one literally “sees” certain things *much more readily* [...]

alas babylon

July 3, 2011 in Links

whenever anybody says anything like “this vision can only succeed if we all get on board and do our parts”… well, all i can hear is “this vision is doomed to fail”. there’s *no way* we’re all going to get on board… we all never got on board with *anything*. never have so far anyway. [...]