Theidlerhour - Bricolage Brain

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

Nikolai Lobachevsky (via curiosamathematica)

Nothing could make me more curious about your taxidermy than this.

Check out these scientists reacting to the first images from the Hubble Space Telescope after they successfully fixed its wonky mirror.

Then watch our music video celebrating Hubble here.

Then read all about Hubble’s 25 years in space here.

“Todd why is the office flooded?”

“Aesthetic.”

This satellite, Explorer 24, was a 12-foot-diameter inflatable sphere developed by an engineering team at Langley. It provided information on complex solar radiation/air-density relationships in the upper atmosphere.  It was launched on November 21, 1964.

While not all graphs can be drawn in R2, every single finite graph can be drawn in the 3 dimensional space R3. The example I will use is called a book embedding.

Imagine you put all of the vertices on the same line in R3. There are an infinite number of planes that go through every point on that line, and do not overlap anywhere else.

You can put each edge on a distinct plane, and they do not overlap, so it is a valid embedding in R3.

In fact, you don’t need to have one plane for each edge. You can put multiple edges on the same plane and they still don’t cross each other.

The minimum number of pages you need to embed a graph is constant no matter which order you put the vertices on the line.

Happy Birthday Carl (1934 - 1996). Your legacy continues to shine.