The 191st Carnival of Mathematics

This is my first time hosting the Aperiodical Carnival of Mathematics. The Carnival is a round of math blogging that shares various articles, posts, videos, and more. Last month was hosted by Sophie the Mathmo and next month will be hosted by Eddies Math and Calculator Blog.

I love the tradition of the Carnival to take a look at the number, and was excited to get the prime number 191. It is a centered 19-gonal (or Lazy Caterer’s) number. I thought about working on cake cutting code, but ended up making the visual for the 19-gonal number(right). 191 in binary is 10111111, making it an odious number (an odd number of ones). It is also a Thabit number, Sophie Germain Prime, Einstein Prime, Gaussian Prime, Palindromic Prime, Strong Prime, and the first non-Reptend Prime. This information is from Wikipedia.

Now for the Carnival…

Mark Kaercher submitted The Tomahawk – an Angle Trisection Tool. I enjoyed his videos and instructions and had fun making this tool. I look forward to doing this with students. The question “why does this work?” is fun to ponder.

Peter Kagey submitted Regular Truchet Tilings. As someone who is slightly obsessed with Truchet tiles, I really enjoyed this article. Peter has some beautiful art, interesting links, and fun people and bots to follow as well (including Ayliean on twitter with her math zines).

Peter Rowlett submitted The symmetries of Covid-19, which looks at how we visualize the Covid-19 virus. The article opens with the question of “what are the rotational symmetries of the Covid-19 virus?” Could it possibly be octahedral? or does it not fit these polyhedral models? Why do we often see icosahedral images for viruses?

Robin Whitty submitted To cheer you up in difficult times 21: Giles Gardam lecture and new result on Kaplansky’s conjectures.

Courtney Gibbons submitted an inspiring video for her students that may be meaningful for many people to work on ourselves as individuals (not just math):

Larissa Fedunik-Hofman submitted an interview with Jared Field on research and applications of mathematics in a wide range of topics:

And in News (what I found time to read about this month)…

Quanta Magazine has a great article Mathematicians Set Numbers in Motion to Unlock Their Secrets with excellent visuals.

Ars Technica has an interesting article Scientists create new class of “Turing patterns” in colonies of E. coli.