Throwback Fact: Heptadecagon

Regular heptadecagon

image: commons.wikimedia.org

Euclid, the great mathematician who left us Elements and a base upon which to build modern geometry, never determined how to construct a regular seventeen-sided polygon before his death around 300 BCE. For more than 1,000 years after Euclid's death, mathematicians knew how to construct many regular n-gons, but the heptadecagon was elusive. That is, until a nineteen-year-old Gauss discovered a method to construct the polygon in 1796. He used only a straight-edge and compass, as Euclid would have done.

If you'd like to explore the numbers behind the construction, visit the explanation on this Wolfram page.

image: commons.wikimedia.org

It is incredible to consider Gauss' discoveries at this young age. For example, he invented modular arithmetic only about a week after the heptadecagon construction. Gauss continued to make mathematical discoveries until his death in 1855, but he always considered the constuction of a regular heptadecagon one of his greatest.

"Snowmageddon" Snowmen

A 1935 photo of two children building a two-section snowman.

source: Time.com article

Greetings from the vestiges of New England! Yesterday the Worldwide Center of Math closed our office to work from home as one of the biggest blizzards Boston has ever seen blew through. Many of the area's universities and high schools have another snow day today. While movies and hot chocolate are always fun, nothing makes a snow day like a snowman.

Problem of the Week

Like the start of each week, we have posted the following problem on our Facebook, Twitter, and Google + pages. We found it in the archive on mathschallenge.net and we challenge you to warm up your math muscles this cold Monday morning.

Click the picture to enlargen!

I solved the problem for this week pretty quickly. It just took a pen and paper and a little logic. Here's my solution and thought process after the jump...

The Journal of Singularities - Volume 11: January '15 - December '15

The Journal of Singularities

Volume 11

January '15 - December '15

Article 1:

On real anti-bicanonical curves with one double point on the 4th real Hirzebruch surface

GO TO JOURNAL OF SING

go to www.journalofsing.org to read this and all preceding volumes

Friedrich Hirzebruch

Blog updates

image: commons.wikimedia.org

Here at the Center of Math, we're working on a facelift for our blog! It's set to go live early next week. The blog wil still be accessible at this domain. It should not be down for updates for longer than a few minutes, so please bear with us if you visit and see a mess in the next few days. Thank you for reading!

Throwback Fact: Jacob and the Bernoullis

image: en.wikipedia.org

Earlier this month (on January 16^th), Jacob Bernoulli would have reached the age of 360 years. His name is familiar to scientists of all kinds because of his immense number of accomplishments, many of which resulted in a theorem or mathematical  statement named after him. There is the Bernoulli differential equation, the Bernoulli number, the Bernoulli polynomial (of the first and second kind), the Bernoulli’s theorem…