Carnival of Mathematics #116

Hello, and welcome to the 116th edition of the Carnival of Mathematics  For those of you who are unaware, a “blog carnival” is a periodic post that travels from blog to blog and has a collection of posts on a certain topic. This is one of two Maths Carnivals, the other being Math(s) Teachers at Play, the current edition can be found here.

Tradition dictates that we begin this round up with a few facts around the number 116. It’s a fine number, as far as even numbers go. It’s a noncototient, which is pretty cool. There are 116 irreducible polynomials of order 6 over a three element field, it is 38 in base thirtysix. 116 years is the length of the 100 years war and 116 is the record number of wins per season in major league baseball, set by the Cubs in 1906 and equalled by the mariners in 2001. It’s prime factorisation is 2^2 x 29, in roman numerals it is CXVI and it can be represented as the sum of two squares! (4^2 + 10^2)

Now, onto the carnival:

In the news

Katie (@stecks) submitted a number of fantastic news articles to this carnival. The first of which is this piece discussing Simon Beck and his geometric snow art. Ed Southall (@solvemymaths) also wrote about geometric art on a similar scale, sharing this about Jim Denevan.

The next article Katie shared was this amazing piece from Alex Bellos (@alexbellos) informing us of the amazingly geeky things Macau have done with their new Magic Square stamps! It almost makes me want to take up stamp collecting!

Maths Applications

Grace, over at “My math-y adventures” tells us how she’s put her undergraduate mathematical studies to good use by creating a model to help her with a real life decision.

And Andrea Hawksley writes this phenomenal piece exploring the maths of dancing.

But where there’s good, there’s bad, and here you can see the sort of fake real life contexts that irk Dave (@reflectivemaths) and myself.

A bit of calculus

John D Cook as submitted a lovely integration trick which I’d not seen before.

Augustus Van Dusen gives us part four of his review of “Inside interesting integrals” by Paul Nahin.

Interesting numbers

3010 tangents have been exploring the infinite with this superb post: “my infinity is bigger than yours”.

Over at the mathematical mystery tour they have shown us how to write pi using primes!

Fawn Nguyen has this great exploration of finding the greatest product.

Geometric thinking

Jo (@mathsjem) has written this excellent piece on circle theorems.

@dragon_dodo has produced this cartoon which illustrates Colin’s (@icecolbeveridge) position on radians.

A bit of fun

The folks over at futility closet have shared this idea about creating an indoor boomerang!

This week saw the UKMT Senior Maths Challenge, and here is my favourite question.

I spent some time at the children’s playground with my daughter, and found this mathematics there.

Manan (@shahlock) over at maths misery turns infuriating into fun talking about fractions and algebra.

Behind the mathematician

Behind the mathematician is a great series from Amir (@workedgechaos) who submitted Martin Noon’s (@letsgetmathing) edition for the carnival! (Mine is available here.)

Podcast

This month saw the annual maths jam conference, which brought with it the exciting prospect of a live special of “Wrong, But useful” my favourite maths podcast!

And that rounds up the 116the edition of the Carnival of Mathematics. I hope you enjoyed reading all these wonderful posts as much as I did. If you have a post for the next carnival submit it here.