#recreational mathematics

[arconinternet]

The Canterbury Puzzles (Book, Henry Dudeney, 1907)

You can read it here. If the Internet Archive is still down, you can also read it on Project Gutenberg here.

Image above is from here (also archived here).

[anarchychess]

What do I do in this position?

I was trying to finish this Queen endgame which I was obviously going to win, but then some idiot started placing these weird colored shapes on the board! They look kinda like dominoes, but with five squares... really deranged stuff.

[desmos-calculator]

Oh, Martin Gardner...

Thanks

[the-math-hatter]

Dice, Dice and more Dice: The Quest for a Fair 38-Sided Die

Coming to a Youtube Channel near you. Ever since I binged Gravity Falls over the course of a couple weeks two and a half years ago, I’ve been wrestling with one observation:

^ That is not a 38-sided die. Just barely half, actually. This die is quite clearly modeled on a d20, which comes woefully short. So I have wrestled with the question: what would a d38 look like? And could I make one? Due to Grant Sanderson’s (3blue1brown) wonderful, now yearly challenge called the Summer of Math Exposition, in its third year (SoME3), and being connected with someone who is just as invested but with more coding knowledge than me, I will be able to deliver a hopefully satisfying answer. And not just an answer, a real, physical model. Maybe if there’s even enough desire, I could slap together a storefront and sell these real, physical models. Who knows? If you want to be @’d when the video drop, please say “Me!” in the comments below this post. I think I’ve got something big here, for both the mathematical world and the Gravity Falls fandom.

[emotion-xp]

Fun fact: 3d6 and 7d4-7 have exactly the same mean and standard deviation. So although their ranges are a little different (3-18 and 0-21), in every other way they produce very similar outcomes.

If you have custom dice, you could roll 7d4-7 by adding up seven dice labelled (0, 1, 2, 3).

@probablybadrpgideas Roll your stats this way. It will be more fiddly and annoying and have no benefits.

[a-disconcerting-bop]

[nyktomorphia]

algebraic toPOYO!gy

kirby reads hatcher!

[oneirophasia]

[beans-in-a-toaster]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[arconinternet]

Amusements in Mathematics (Book, Henry Dudeney, 1917)

You can read it here. If the Internet Archive's still down, you can also read it on Project Gutenberg here.

[nyktomorphia]

Through the power of calculus, Kirby has entered The Future!

So the time has come to answer the question that no one asked: "All the other variables in that function Kirby's pondering are colourful shapes, so why is it triple-integrated over the letter E?"

So I could hide this joke in it, of course.

"...named for Robion Kirby, is a method for modifying framed links..."

"...in the 3-sphere using a finite set of moves, the Kirby moves."

"Using four-dimensional Cerf theory, he proved that if M and N are 3-manifolds..."

"...resulting from Dehn surgery on framed links L and J respectively..."

"...then they are homeomorphic if and only if L and J are related by a sequence of Kirby moves."

"According to the Lickorish-Wallace theorem, any closed orientable 3-manifold is obtained by such surgery on some link in the 3-sphere."

[rovermcfly]

play it by ear season 2 episode 9

[korrasamibottles]

Sometimes I forget not everyone shares my opinions on plants and nature and whatever and it totally throws me, like yesterday I met somebody who hates this row of beautiful giant spruces in town because it blocks their view of a building (?) and I was like what the absolute FUCK are you talking about

[michaelrotonal]

Normal

Statistics

A distribution is normal if... uh... its probability distribution is, uh, like e^-x²?

Normal

Recreational Mathematics?

A number x is normal in base B if each finite string of base B appears just as often in x's base B expansion as it does in an infinite random sequence of digits.

Normal

Linear Algebra, I think?

The normal of a surface at the point P is one of the two unit vectors perpendicular to it at the point P.

personally, I'd say i think about trains a normal amount

[what-even-is-thiss]

Brian David Gilbert accidentally reinventing ska aside, I do wonder why there was barely any new music written after the 1960s in the fallout universe. To the point where people in the wasteland aren’t just listening to 200 year old music but 300 year old music. During fallout 4 if you’re listening to diamond city radio when the one original song comes on Travis freaks out because he’s not used to playing tracks by people that are still alive.

If I’m gonna come up with an in-universe explanation I might guess that it’s an extreme example of what might happen if a nation devalues art to the point that cultural stagnation occurs.

Creativity is so discouraged in favor of science, warfare, engineering, and mathematics that nothing new gets produced. Old patterns for clothes are used for over 100 years, hairstyle books and learning materials are never updated, almost no new music is written. Deviating even slightly from American exceptionalism and style is heresy. New ideas outside of the sciences are stupid and to be mocked. What few artists remain just learn how to recreate what’s already been done.

I mean a vault full of musicians wasn’t even a control vault. There was no real effort to preserve musical knowledge. They were subjects in a mind control experiment.

And this attitude gets carried into the big afterwards. After the Great War all that several generations have ever known is the devaluing of creativity and new ideas. And everyone is too tired and focused on survival to try anything new.

So Magnolia writing new music? That’s weird. That’s really weird. It’s been weird for over 300 years at that point.

And if I’m remembering correctly, the only people you meet in the games writing poetry are writing really bad poetry. But in this sort of context, that makes sense. There’s this idea in writing circles that when you take a long break from writing you need to allow yourself some time to write very badly in order to clean the garbage out of your brain and get your creativity muscles exercised again.

The fallout universe is experiencing this on a global massive societal scale. Jerry the Punk writing bad poetry comparing a girl to a deathclaw and Beatrice writing a bad poem about being stuck underground is a sign of slow but steady healing. The fallout world is getting a lot of garbage out of its system from over 300 years of cultural stagnation and learning how to make stuff again.