Category Archives: Announcements

Brief public administrative notes

25 Oct

Announcing the Oxyhedron

Studio Infinity has teamed up with Prof. Jim Brown and the Occidental Math Dept. to create the Oxyhedron on Friday, 2023 Nov 10, starting at 10 AM. The installation will take place just outside Fowler Hall, which houses the Math Dept. I did a site visit today; on the right you can see the quarter-scale mockup being used as a stand-in to plan the event, held in place by Jim.

The structure we’ll be building is the octahedron analogue of the Sierpinski tetrahedron that formed the basis of Fort Sierpinski on the campus of Lafayette College last fall. It will consist of 1,968 rods and 457 hubs from The Ultimate Fort Builder construction set distributed by Lakeshore Learning.

Below is the poster announcing the build (note the image is to scale). Anyone reading this who will be in the area on Nov 10 is welcome to attend. More details and pictures will be posted as the event unfolds.

11 Mar

Call for Polyhedra

Studio Infinity is pleased to announce the preparation of a new traveling art/science exhibit, Polyplane. The producers, Alex Kontorovich and Glen Whitney, are seeking submissions of physical polyhedra to become part of the exhibit. A broad variety of media and styles are welcomed, in support of the central aims of Polyplane: to celebrate the beauty of geometric forms while allowing visitors to directly perceive a fundamental law that governs them, Euler’s Polyhedron Formula. For more information and to reserve space for the polyhedron of your choice, visit polyplane.org.

12 Apr

New Call for Problems

Hey, I have recently become the Problem Warden for the Prison Math Project (PMP). That means I’m the editor of The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the quarterly problem section of the PMP newsletter. So I’d love it if you have intersting problems or mathematical puzzles to submit to the column. Of course, you will be credited online and in the newsletter for any problems you submit.

I also welcome solutions to the existing problems from anyone. Problems range in difficulty from high-school contest level up to roughly the easiest end of Putnam competition problems. So to submit problems or solutions, please email me at dilemma “at” pmathp “dot” org. Looking forward to your ideas!

23 Mar

Summer 2021 PCMI Illustrating Math

This post was for announcing a week-long summer workshop on Illustrating Mathematics at the Park City Mathematics Institute, this past 2021 July 19-23. It was an exciting week with lots of interesting programming including several different hands-on, how-to tutorials, keynotes by Vernelle Noel, Ingrid Daubechies, and Daniel Piker, and mathematical “show-and-ask” sessions in which a wide array of mathematicians displayed some of the intriguing and beautiful images and objects they’ve created, as well as highlighting the questions these projects have raised. (I led one minicourse on using CAD/CAM software like LibreCAD or FreeCAD in creating physical mathematical models.)

30 Jul

Problematic Postcards

If you’ve come here as a result of a puzzling postcard you may have come across, welcome to Studio Infinity! We hope you’ll enjoy looking at some of the other content below as well, but here are the three posts corresponding to the problems you can find on those postcards, each of which links to a solution.

Insubordinate Integral
Smallish Sequence
Troubling Triangle

And, as I’ve mentioned here before, I invite you all to submit a problem or solution to Math Horizons Playground.

14 Apr

Call for Puzzles

Hey, I have recently become problem editor for the undergraduate Math Horizons magazine of the Mathematical Association of America. So I’d love if you have problems/mathematical puzzles to submit to the column. The official submission blurb follows, and of course you will be credited in the Magazine.

The Playground features problems for students at the undergraduate and (challenging) high school levels. Problems or solutions (including more elegant or extended solutions to Carousel problems) should be submitted to MHproblems@maa.org or MHsolutions@maa.org, respectively. Paper submissions may be sent to Glen Whitney, ICERM, 121 South Main Street, Box E, 11th Floor, Providence, RI 02903 . Please include your name, email address, and school or institutional affiliation, and indicate if you are a student. If a problem has multiple parts, solutions for individual parts will be accepted. Unless otherwise stated, problems have been solved by their proposers.

24 Jan

Gengzhi Goblets Overview

Welcome to Studio Infinity! You most likely reached this page via the link on the Gengzhi Goblets given away at G4G13. Here are pointers to more in-depth discussions of the Goblets. I’d love to hear from you, so please leave a comment here, and if you want to reach me, my email is glen (at) the domain of this site.

Oh, and please see my call for problems/puzzles. If I can get four or five problems collected from G4G attendees, I can do one of my columns in MAA Math Horizons dedicated to Martin Gardner!

P.S. You may have noted that this URL seems to refer to something called the Cavalieri Content Cups. Well, that was the working name for this project before I realized, courtesy of Wikipedia, that the Chinese mathematician Zu Gengzhi elucidated the principle on which the the Goblets are based more than a millennium before Bonaventura Cavalieri did. Naturally, once that fact came to light, these items needed to be renamed, as indeed the principle itself should be, to the Gengzhi Principle.

In any case, to the links:

Mathematical Free Association, in which the question of a suitable G4G13 giveaway is pondered

Archimedean Variations, in which the realm of possibilities identified is explored

Portion Prototyping, in which the leading candidate is converted to physical reality

Gengzhi Goblets, in which the final design is produced in quantity

I hope you enjoy your measuring cups; if you happen to reach here and do not have a set and would like to, please contact me via the means listed above to find out how you can obtain a set.