the Max Peck show

Naked + Mathematics = Smiles 2010/12/22

Posted by Zsuzsa in Fantastical.
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So pretend you’re me and you are intimately involved with numbers. I mean you really like numbers. Everything you think you see around you are numbers. And then those numbers mingle and co-mingle and form equations and sometimes they come to some solution and sometimes they don’t.

But no matter, you love them anyway.

Let’s not get too caught up in being a number theorist today and let’s talk about geometry. As is the case with say Sierpinski’s Triangle or Pascal’s Triangle, you don’t even need to see, or know, the numbers in order to understand the basic rules that then result in incredible geometry.

Excellent.

So what’s even better than thinking about math? Did you forget there was something better? Let’s do it naked. Specifically, let’s talk a little bit about Mike Naylor’s Naked Geometry.

You want to know why we’re going to do this? If you’re not ridiculously passionate about doing math naked, or at least talking about it, you probably shouldn’t be reading my blog. So I’ll carry-on and talk about it anyway.

Beautiful expressions of mathematics stimulate the aesthetic centers of the brain in the same way as beautiful artwork or music. By combining mathematics, art, and the human form, Naked Geometry seeks to simultaneously appeal to the reader’s mind, body, and spirit. Besides, what could be better than thinking about math while looking at naked people?

yes. Yes. YES.

Though I’ll be totally honest, I prefer to look at only one naked person when thinking and talking about mathematics, but with only two people and a limited number of side-lengths the game runs out pretty quickly.

Hey, what the heck? For the sake of mathematics let’s be polygoniously-polyamorous for a while. *heart* <3

So this brilliant guy Mike Naylor started doing this in 2002 and quickly moved from clay models to digital art, check it out:

 

Name	Faces	Edges	Vertices
Tetrahedron	4	4	4
Cube	6	12	8
Octahedron	8	12	6
Dodecahedron	12	30	20
Icosahedron	20	30	12

So from polyhedra we can move to fractals…

To the Golden Ratio…

A square may again be removed from a golden rectangle; the remaining portion is another golden rectangle. The process may be continued infinitely.

To tesselations…

 

And let’s not forget to expand my favorite bagel pastime to the Mobius Strip…

 

… and so on. Okay, now I really involved things by bringing bagels into the equation.

Mathematics + Naked + Bagels.
Or is it Naked + Mathematics + Bagels?
Or Bagels + Mathematics + Naked?
Or….. oh what the hell, a true mathematician will believe, if only for an instant, that if instead of Naked, Mathematics and Bagels we use numbers then the commutative property will tell us these are all the same.

However, I beg to differ. Do we start by getting naked first, then talk about mathematics, then add bagels? Or do we start talking mathematics to get things in the mood, then get naked, then add bagels later?

Okay… let’s start over.

One.  Stretching a point in any direction, say along the x-axis, creates a one-dimensional line segment.

Two.  A one-dimensional line segment can be stretched along an orthogonal axis (in the y-direction) to make a 2D square.

Three.  If a 2D square in the x-y plane is stretched in the z direction, a 3D cube may  be formed.

 

Four.  Stretching a cube along the w-axis (perpendicular to each of the x-, y-, and z-axes) can create a 4D hypercube.

1, 2, 3, 4 …. or is it…?

I don’t know. If we ask Fibonacci it’s as easy as 1, 1, 2, 3.

Well shit, that’s no good. Not in making our hyper-naked-sex-cube anyway. Thanks Mike Naylor.

Okay, so to give you a little teaser about what else I’ve got brewing in the ol’ draft folder, I want to talk about NUMBERS. Yum.

Let’s not get crazy and talk about the sick number games going on in my head, but if you’re a number theorist you are absolutely enamored by prime numbers. And even though you’ve got your primes memorized up to at least 1,000, that doesn’t change that primes, in general, are difficult to find.

Oh wait, we don’t really need to know what the numbers are…

Say, if I asked you to find me the highest even number you’d be like, “that’s silly. Give me the even number you think is the highest and I’ll just add 2 to it. BAM!” Amazing.

But guess what the highest prime number we know is??

2^43,112,609 – 1

Just to give you an idea of what a big deal prime numbers are – the guy who found this one won $100,000. Whoa.

Prime Numbers to come.