Stories by Evelyn Lamb

I was in New York City earlier this month, and in addition to finally having an excuse to ride the Staten Island Ferry (I gave a talk there), I managed to make it to a few of the excellent museums in the city.

Monkeys! Mathematical groups! 4-dimensional geometry! Together at last! This sculpture, called More Fun than a Hypercube of Monkeys, answers an open question: has the quaternion group ever appeared as the symmetry group of an object?

Evelyn Boyd Granville, the second African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, turns 90 today (May 1, 2014). I first heard her name in a talk by Patricia Kenschaft about African American mathematicians.

In February, I wrote about Euclid’s parallel postulate, the black sheep of the big, happy family of definitions, postulates, and axioms that make up the foundations of Euclidean geometry.

We all know a lot of measurements about ourselves. You are some number of feet or meters tall. You weigh some number of pounds, kilograms, or stone.

Last month, I went to a talk by mathematician Annalisa Crannell of Franklin and Marshall College called Math and Art: the good, the bad, and the pretty.

“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” --from Little Gidding by T.S.

Warren Buffett’s Bracket Challenge* has put even more of a spotlight than usual on March Madness, the annual NCAA basketball tournament.

Tired of the circle constant? The prime counting function π(x) is an alternative way to celebrate everyone's favorite Greek letter that sounds like a dessert.

In 1879, Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, published an odd little book called Euclid and his Modern Rivals (available for free at the Internet Archive).

The parallel postulate is a stubborn wrinkle in a sheet: you can try to smooth it out, but it never really goes away

Mathematician and knitter sarah-marie belcastro uses math to inspire her knitting projects

A meeting of the minds at the intersection of mathematics and fiber arts yields eye-popping creations

“The treatise itself, therefore, contains only twenty-four pagesthe most extraordinary two dozen pages in the whole history of thought!” “How different with BolyaiJnos and Lobachvski, who claimed at once, unflinchingly, that their discovery marked an epoch in human thought so momentous as to be unsurpassed by anything recorded in the history of philosophy or of [...]

Tom Stoppard’s absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead begins with one of them, Guildenstern (or is it Rosencrantz?), flipping coins.

A Numberphile video posted earlier this month claims that the sum of all the positive integers is -1/12. Is it true?

Every once in a while I stumble on an interesting collective noun, usually for animals: a parliament of owls, a knot of toads, an exaltation of larks.

My most popular posts from this blog's first year

I just finished reading a set of lectures the great mathematician Felix Klein delivered at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

I started writing about math and science in June 2012 thanks to an AAAS Mass Media Fellowship sponsored by the American Mathematical Society.

Back in September, I published an interview with mathematician and mom Constance Leidy by mathematician and mom Lillian Pierce. It was part of a series of interviews for the Association for Women in Mathematics about how women balance motherhood with their mathematical careers.

Unless you’re holding a baby or a scalpel, drop everything and read this blog post about hypocycloids by John Baez. (And if you’re holding a scalpel, please put away whatever device you’re reading this on and pay attention to your surgery!) In addition to a lovely exposition by Baez, the post features some gorgeous animations [...]

Surfaces are complicated. Triangles are simple. That’s an idea behind some methods of creating computer graphics and some advanced mathematics.

Last year, the inimitable Vi Hart made a Thanksgiving video series, describing how to imbue your holiday celebration with more mathematics.