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Math Stories

15 posts in Math Stories.

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Math Stories4 min read

When math dances with music: a jukebox experiment.

Fibonacci in Carnatic rhythms, the 2–4 beat of a rock anthem, and fifteen songs rebuilt in Chrome Music Lab to hear the numbers underneath them.

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Math Stories4 min read

1729: the number connecting Futurama and Srinivasa Ramanujan.

A taxi, a hospital visit and a "dull" number that turned out to be the smallest expressible as the sum of two cubes in two ways — and then kept turning up in a cartoon set a thousand years from now.

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Math Stories3 min read

What makes 73 the Chuck Norris of numbers?

Sheldon Cooper's favourite number, the conjecture named after him, and the 2019 proof that 73 really is the only prime with its peculiar set of properties.

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Math Stories3 min read

Football: why the ball has 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons.

Written an hour before a World Cup kicked off — the geometry of the 32-panel ball, why it flies straighter, and what changed when panels stopped being stitched.

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Math Stories3 min read

The four colour theorem: why every map needs only four crayons.

A schoolboy's question in 1852, a century of failed proofs, and the first major theorem settled by a computer that no human could fully check by hand.

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Math Stories3 min read

God's number: solving every one of 43 quintillion Rubik's Cube positions.

Why the shortest possible solution is called God's algorithm, how 35 CPU-years of Google's idle time settled it, and why humans still need forty-plus moves.

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Math Stories3 min read

The butterfly effect: what chaos theory actually says.

A butterfly in Brazil, a tornado in Texas — the metaphor, the maths of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and why weather forecasts run out.

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Math Stories4 min read

A Mathematician's Lament: the book that says we're teaching the wrong subject.

Paul Lockhart's argument that mathematics is an art — and that school maths has the facts and formulas but almost none of the mathematics.

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Math Stories4 min read

Moneyball: how a third of the Yankees' budget bought a 20-game streak.

The Oakland Athletics replaced batting averages with on-base and slugging percentages, and recruited the players everyone else was undervaluing.

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Math Stories3 min read

Wordle: what the letter statistics say about your first guess.

Five letters, six guesses. Over 15% of answers start with S, vowels dominate the middle, and the words almost never end in S.

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Math Stories3 min read

Game of Thrones: maths picks the protagonist.

Two mathematicians turned A Storm of Swords into a network of 107 characters and 353 links — and the answer wasn't Jon Snow.

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Math Stories3 min read

Enigma: the 159 quintillion reasons it was thought unbreakable.

Rotors, starting positions and a plugboard with ten wires — the arithmetic behind the cipher machine at the heart of The Imitation Game.

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Math Stories3 min read

Tic-tac-toe: 362,880 ways to fill a grid, and only 23 boards that matter.

The simplest game on paper, counted properly — factorials, powers, combinations, and the symmetries that collapse 126 boards into 23.

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Math Stories3 min read

Let's Make a Deal: why you should always switch doors.

Three doors, one prize, a host who knows where it is. Most people stay. Pigeons learn to switch. The maths says the pigeons are right.

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Math Stories5 min read

Homer's last theorem: the Simpsons equation that almost breaks Fermat.

A blackboard in a 1998 episode carries an equation that seems to defy a theorem it took 358 years to prove. Grab a calculator with more than eight digits.

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