Ars Mathematica

I just saw the movie Stranger than Fiction, and I noticed a strange pattern in the last names of characters: Pascal, Hilbert, Escher, Cayley, Mittag-Leffler. Also, the main character’s favorite word is “integer”. The main character has a penchant for counting, but other than that the movie is as far removed from mathematics as can be imagined, so it’s all very mysterious.

From Asymptotia, I just learned about the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek analog computer. Its full capabilities are not yet known, but the device’s thirty interlocking gears simulate the movements of the Sun, Moon, and Earth well-enough to predict eclipses. Not much is known about the history of the mechanism, which uses technology that was not reinvented until the fourteenth century.

The December Notices of the AMS are out. The two features articles are:

• The Search for Symmetric Simple Venn Diagrams considers Venn diagrams as mathematical objects in their own right, rather than just as a graphical representation of sets.
• Better Ways to Cut a Cake discusses the game theory of cake cutting.

This month’s What is a… Quasiconformal Mapping introduces a generalization of conformal mappings that makes sense in general metric spaces.