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Flexagon
In geometry, flexagons are Plane (geometry), flat models, usually constructed by folding strips of paper, that can be ''flexed'' or folded in certain ways to reveal faces besides the two that were originally on the back and front. Flexagons are usually square or rectangular (tetraflexagons) or hexagon, hexagonal (hexaflexagons). A prefix can be added to the name to indicate the number of faces that the model can display, including the two faces (back and front) that are visible before flexing. For example, a hexaflexagon with a total of six faces is called a hexahexaflexagon. In hexaflexagon theory (that is, concerning flexagons with six sides), flexagons are usually defined in terms of ''pats''. Two flexagons are equivalent if one can be transformed to the other by a series of pinches and rotations. Flexagon equivalence is an equivalence relation. History Discovery and introduction of the hexaflexagon The discovery of the first flexagon, a trihexaflexagon, is credited to t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Möbius Strip
In mathematics, a Möbius strip, Möbius band, or Möbius loop is a Surface (topology), surface that can be formed by attaching the ends of a strip of paper together with a half-twist. As a mathematical object, it was discovered by Johann Benedict Listing and August Ferdinand Möbius in 1858, but it had already appeared in Ancient Rome, Roman mosaics from the third century Common Era, CE. The Möbius strip is a orientability, non-orientable surface, meaning that within it one cannot consistently distinguish clockwise from counterclockwise turns. Every non-orientable surface contains a Möbius strip. As an abstract topological space, the Möbius strip can be embedded into three-dimensional Euclidean space in many different ways: a clockwise half-twist is different from a counterclockwise half-twist, and it can also be embedded with odd numbers of twists greater than one, or with a Knot (mathematics), knotted centerline. Any two embeddings with the same knot for the centerline and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Harold Stone
Arthur Harold Stone (30 September 1916 – 6 August 2000) was a British mathematician, born in London, who worked at the universities of Manchester and Rochester, mostly in topology. His wife was American mathematician Dorothy Maharam. Stone studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. His first paper dealt with squaring the square, he proved the Erdős–Stone theorem with Paul Erdős and is credited with the discovery of the first two flexagons, a trihexaflexagon and a hexahexaflexagon while he was a student at Princeton University in 1939. His Ph.D. thesis, ''Connectedness and Coherence'', was written in 1941 under the direction of Solomon Lefschetz. He served as a referee for ''The American Mathematical Monthly'' journal in the 1980s. The Stone metrization theorem has been named after him, and he was a member of a group of mathematicians who published pseudonymously as Blanche Descartes. He is not to be confused with American mathematician Marshall Harvey Stone. See als ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Martin Gardner
Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914May 22, 2010) was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing magic, scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literatureespecially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton.Martin (2010) He was a leading authority on Lewis Carroll; '' The Annotated Alice'', which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies.Martin Gardner obituary (2010) He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, ''MAGIC'' magazine named him as one of the "10 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mathematical Games Column
Over a period of 24 years (January 1957 – December 1980), Martin Gardner wrote 288 consecutive monthly "Mathematical Games" columns for ''Scientific American'' magazine. During the next years, until June 1986, Gardner wrote 9 more columns, bringing his total to 297. During this period other authors wrote most of the columns. In 1981, Gardner's column alternated with a new column by Douglas Hofstadter called " Metamagical Themas" (an anagram of "Mathematical Games"). The table below lists Gardner's columns. Twelve of Gardner's columns provided the cover art for that month's magazine, indicated by " over in the table with a hyperlink to the cover. Other articles by Gardner Gardner wrote 5 other articles for ''Scientific American''. His flexagon article in December 1956 was in all but name the first article in the series of ''Mathematical Games'' columns and led directly to the series which began the following month. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bryant Tuckerman
Louis Bryant Tuckerman, III (November 28, 1915 – May 19, 2002) was an American mathematician born in Lincoln, Nebraska. He was a member of the team that developed the Data Encryption Standard (DES). He studied topology at Princeton, where he invented the Tuckerman traverse method for revealing all the faces of a flexagon. On March 4, 1971, he discovered the 24th Mersenne prime In mathematics, a Mersenne prime is a prime number that is one less than a power of two. That is, it is a prime number of the form for some integer . They are named after Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 1 ..., a titanic prime, with a value of :2^-1. References External links Tuckerman Obituary 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 1915 births 2002 deaths IBM employees People from Briarcliff Manor, New York Mathematicians from New York (state) {{US-mathematician-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rubik's Magic
Rubik's Magic, like the Rubik's Cube, is a mechanical puzzle invented by Ernő Rubik and first manufactured by Matchbox in the mid-1980s. The puzzle consists of eight black square tiles (changed to red squares with goldish rings in 1997) arranged in a 2 × 4 rectangle; diagonal grooves on the tiles hold wires that connect them, allowing them to be folded onto each other and unfolded again in two perpendicular directions (assuming that no other connections restrict the movement) in a manner similar to a Jacob's ladder toy. The front side of the puzzle shows, in the initial state, three separate, rainbow-colored rings; the back side consists of a scrambled picture of three interconnected rings. The goal of the game is to fold the puzzle into a heart-like shape and unscramble the picture on the back side, thus interconnecting the rings. Numerous ways to accomplish this exist, and experienced players can transform the puzzle from its initial into the solved state in less than 2 s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Square (geometry)
In geometry, a square is a regular quadrilateral. It has four straight sides of equal length and four equal angles. Squares are special cases of rectangles, which have four equal angles, and of rhombuses, which have four equal sides. As with all rectangles, a square's angles are right angles (90 degrees, or /2 radians), making adjacent sides perpendicular. The area of a square is the side length multiplied by itself, and so in algebra, multiplying a number by itself is called squaring. Equal squares can tile the plane edge-to-edge in the square tiling. Square tilings are ubiquitous in tiled floors and walls, graph paper, image pixels, and game boards. Square shapes are also often seen in building floor plans, origami paper, food servings, in graphic design and heraldry, and in instant photos and fine art. The formula for the area of a square forms the basis of the calculation of area and motivates the search for methods for squaring the circle by compass and straightedge ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jacob's Ladder (toy)
A Jacob's ladder (also magic tablets, Chinese blocks, and klick-klack toyFrauenfelder, Mark (2011). ''Make: Technology On Your Time, Vol. 26: Roll Your Own'', p.148. O'Reilly Media. .) is a folk toy consisting of blocks of wood held together by strings or ribbons. When the ladder is held at one end, blocks appear to cascade down the strings. This effect is a visual illusion which is the result of one block after another flipping over. It may be considered a kinetic illusion, where the blocks appear to change position when they do not. Its name ''Jacob's Ladder'' comes from the biblical ladder to heaven, mentioned in Genesis 28:12. Of unknown origin, the earliest known review of the Jacob's Ladder is an 1889 ''Scientific American'' article which tells how it is built and works: Construction An arrangement of interlaced ribbons allows each block to act as if hinged to the next one at either of its two ends. The same mechanism is used in the 1980s toy Rubik's Magic, but with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Himber
Richard Himber (born Herbert Richard Imber; February 20, 1899 – December 11, 1966) was an American bandleader, composer, violinist, magician and practical joker. Early life He was born as Herbert Richard Imber in Newark, New Jersey to the owner of a chain of meat stores. His parents gave him violin lessons, but when they found him performing in a seedy Newark dive, they took the instrument away from him and sent him to military school. In 1915, he stole away into New York City, where Sophie Tucker heard him play and hired him as a novelty act to play with her and the ''Five Kings of Syncopation'' where Himber was the highlight of the cabaret act. He worked his way through Vaudeville and down Tin Pan Alley. He managed Rudy Vallee's orchestra service, which sent out bands for private parties and society functions. A suave salesman and irrepressible idea man, he soon had his own band booking agency. In 1932, he acquired the first known "vanity" telephone number, ''R-HIMBER'', ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
