{"id":1257,"date":"2025-02-02T23:09:27","date_gmt":"2025-02-03T07:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/puzzlezapper.com\/blog\/?p=1257"},"modified":"2025-02-02T23:09:27","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T07:09:27","slug":"carnival-of-mathematics-236","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/puzzlezapper.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/carnival-of-mathematics-236\/","title":{"rendered":"Carnival of Mathematics #236"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Welcome to the 236th Carnival of Mathematics<\/a>! 236 is the number of total partitions of 5. I drew up a graphic of the 26 total partitions of 4:<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The total partition sequence is A000311<\/a> in the OEIS<\/a>. It also describes the number of possible phylogenetic trees of n species in evolutionary biology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 2025th Carnival of mathematics is still quite a way off, so I hope its host won’t mind me stealing their thunder. At the turn of the year there was a fair amount of chat about 2025 being the sum of the cubes of 1 through 9, and related facts. The Mathematical Visual Proofs Youtube channel posted a video<\/a> with a nice visual demonstration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Submissions:<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Colin Beveridge blogged about the scoring system at the 1995 World Figure Skating Championships<\/a>, where the final skater posted a performance that left her in fourth place, but caused the places of the second and third place skaters to switch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Renaissance Mathematicus wrote a lengthy and rather critical review<\/a> of The Secret Lives of Numbers<\/em>:\u00a0A Global History of Mathematics & Its Unsung Trailblazers<\/em>, by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Mathateca +Resource blog posted a much shorter review<\/a> of Much Ado About Numbers by Robert Eastaway., along with links to related material about Elizabethan mathematics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brian Clegg posted the introduction<\/a> to his book, A Brief History of Infinity, as the start of a (likely finite) series of posts on the topic of infinity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kit Yates posted about strategy<\/a> in the game played on the UK reality show, Traitors. This game is appears to be the same one I know as Werewolf or Mafia, but played for high stakes reality game show prizes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kyle Hovey wrote a Tour of Haskell<\/a>. Functional programming languages like Haskell have powerful type systems and syntax for manipulating functions that appeal to mathematical minds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zach M. Davis wrote about competing in the Putnam exam<\/a> as a non-traditional college student at a college (San Francisco State University) without a history of participation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Karen Campe wrote a pair of posts on using dynamic geometry software to aid students’ understanding. The first<\/a> covers invariants<\/em>, properties that do not change when you manipulate a figure. The second<\/a> is on the difference between drawing<\/em> a figure and constructing<\/em> one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Victor Poughon explored<\/a> the problem of how to place a number of points on a disk as uniformly as possible. The post contains a nice mixture of mathematical reasoning, Python programming, and visual results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John D. Cook posted<\/a> about notation that makes Newton’s interpolation formula look like a Taylor series. I needed a refresher on Newton’s interpolation formula to appreciate it; I found this video by Will Wood<\/a> to be helpful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bonus Carnival of Polyforms<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Since I am a recreational mathematician who does a lot with polyominoes and other polyforms, (and because nobody is stopping me) I’m going to use this space to share some recent related material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Numberphile recently released a couple of videos with Sophie Maclean on polyominoes. The first is an introduction to polyominoes<\/a>, and what we know about how their numbers grow as a function of their size. The second is on polyomino achievement games<\/a>, i.e., playing tic-tac-toe, where a given polyomino is the goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lewis Patterson made a post on polycube puzzles<\/a> where pieces fit into a 3\u00d73\u00d73 cube. The most famous of these is the Soma puzzle, but there are others!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alexandre Mu\u00f1iz [hmmm…<\/em>] wrote a blog post about moves between polyform tilings<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Puzzle Fun Facebook group remains the most active forum for polyform tiling problems. There have been some remarkable hexahex constructions recently from Roel Huisman (here<\/a>) and Patrick Hamlyn (here<\/a>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of polyhexes, George Sicherman found some Pentahex Pair Tri-oddities<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that’s a wrap! More info on the Carnival, and links to other instances of it, is available at the Aperiodical<\/a>, the Carnival’s metahost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to the 236th Carnival of Mathematics! 236 is the number of total partitions of 5. I drew up a graphic of the 26 total partitions of 4: The total partition sequence is A000311 in the OEIS. It also describes the number of possible phylogenetic trees of n species in evolutionary biology. The 2025th Carnival … Continue reading Carnival of Mathematics #236<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[287],"tags":[288],"class_list":["post-1257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-carnival-of-mathematics","tag-carnival-of-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/puzzlezapper.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/puzzlezapper.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/puzzlezapper.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/puzzlezapper.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/puzzlezapper.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1257"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/puzzlezapper.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1264,"href":"https:\/\/puzzlezapper.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions\/1264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/puzzlezapper.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/puzzlezapper.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/puzzlezapper.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}