Math, Artists, and Crop Circles

Crop circles have moved well past circles. Now they’re jellyfish, dragonflies, and trilobites, drawn using higher math, computers, laser pointers, and GPS’s.  A lovely little essay by a physicist in a recent Nature calls them “modern mathematical artworks” and hopes that this summer will produce a “bumper batch.”   They seem to have no larger meaning, […]

Abstruse Goose: The Sum of All Knowledge

Pay attention to the quote below the drawing.  John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist whose specialities were nuclear physics, gravitation — he created the term, “black hole” — and getting people riled up.   He died in 2008 at age 96. I mean, when Victor Hugo writes that science says the last word on nothing, […]

Abstruse Goose

Abstruse Goose is a nameless, faceless entity, obviously a mathematician of some sort, who posts extremely funny but occasionally abstruse cartoons at http://abstrusegoose.com. http://abstrusegoose.com/275