Kyle and Chaim get into trouble with their wives and Mathfactor correspondent, Stephen Morris, discusses the Kate Bush Conjecture and And The Clocks Struck Thirteen  

 

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Oh by the way, would you like a cool Math Factor Poster? Click on this to download:

Our favorite new and not-so-new products of 2008!

 

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Check out these great gifts!

• Zome is an incredibly powerful construction system!
• the great puzzles of Puzzellation (available at Barnes and Nobles)
• The terrific puzzle computer game DROD
• The Magic Mirror Image Coloring Book
• The Riddles of the Sphinx by David J Bodycombe, an amazing compendium of puzzles, of hundreds of kinds, at all levels of difficulty, with historical essays to boot!
• Which leads us to Nikoli, the great Japanese puzzle co! (Rules can be found here)
• The Princeton Companion to Mathematics is a landmark classic. A must-have for every serious student, researcher or amateur.
• How Round is Your Circle just one of the many fantastic titles out on Princeton University Press
• AK Peters is another fantastic press, with a wide range of interesting math and CS titles, including, ahem, the Symmetries of Things.
• Binary Arts/ThinkFun is another source of great puzzles!
• And the authors Martin Gardner and Ivan Moscovitch are always fantastic!

Hope this helps and have fun!! Let us know how it works out!

Happy Holidays from the Math Factor!

 

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Dana Richards, editor of The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems discusses the amazing Martin Gardner and his legacy!

 

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M.C. Escher expert Doris Schattschneider, author of Visions of Symmetry, sits down with us in Leeuwarden Friesland, Escher’s boyhood hometown, to discuss his life and work.

 

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Art Benjamin, mathemagician at Harvey Mudd, staggers, astounds and entertains!

Eric Demaine of MIT will control your minds across all time and all space!

Not surprisingly, we suppose, this trick is closely related to an important mathematical tool of the telecommunications industry:

Gray Codes are tremendously useful; a great, very readable discussion is in Chapter 2 of Martin Gardner’s Knotted Donuts and Other Mathematical Entertainments.

 

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Now, really, tell me, what good is a podcast if you can’t promote your beautiful new book?

We are very very pleased to announce the publication of The Symmetries of Things, a comprehensive, modern account of the mathematics of symmetry, complete with over 1000 illustrations!

Neil Sloane of ATT Labs shares some his favorite integer sequences from his online encyclopedia!

Recaman’s Sequence is especially perplexing! Sloane asks: does every number eventually appear?

(No one yet knows the answer!)

 

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Mathematics writer Barry Cipra shows us Tag Deal, a simple but perplexing puzzle with cards.

 

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Frank Morgan of Williams College asks “What is the shape of a double bubble?”

 

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photo: Jeff Bauer