The Romans (among others!) wrote in wax with a stylus; the wax was embedded in boards, which were bound together in pairs. If a Roman were to place clay between these boards, could they make a copy of their wax tablet in the clay? It strikes me as remarkable that coins were minted so long […]

I gave a talk in the Farb and Friends Student Seminar (back in March!) on: Davis, Michael W.; Januszkiewicz, Tadeusz Hyperbolization of polyhedra. J. Differential Geom. 34 (1991), no. 2, 347—388. This is an awesome paper—well-worth a few words on every blog! The construction is way easier than you might think. […]

I’ll briefly introduce the Lights Out puzzle: the game is played on an n-by-n grid of buttons which, when pressed, toggle between a lit and unlit state. The twist is that toggling a light also toggles the state of its neighbors (above, below, right, left—although, on the boundary, lights have fewer neighbors). All […]

I made a movie recently for my advisor. The movie is so pretty, that I thought I’d share it here: may I present to you randomly drawn dots, where two dots are the same color when they touch! Get the latest Flash Player to see this player. [Javascript required to view Flash movie, please turn it […]