"Money" Laundering: Doing it the Literal Way

Well, it wasn't my intent to discover this, but my debit card and university ID card survived their trip through the washer and dryer remarkably well.

Their Gaussian curvatures got transformed a bit, but overall they're doing alright.

Sometimes, I am such a theorist.

Note: I suggest responding with your best money-laundering joke.

Additional note: My debit card still has its glossy sheen, but the ID card's surface isn't quite as smooth as it used to be.

Tales from the ArXiv: Rodents in Hyperbolic Spaces

This morning, I noticed the new paper Can Rodents Conceive Hyperbolic Spaces? With a title like that, clearly the paper deserved a closer look.

The abstract also includes a great line: We show that, according to self-organizing models, if raised in a non-Euclidean hyperbolic cage rats should be able to form hyperbolic grids.

I know I have obvious biases as a mathematician, but the idea in the paper seems really cool to me.

Gaussian Curvature and its Practical Consequences

Wired has a very cool article about manifolds and curvature.

I have used ice cream cones (and the act of unrolling them) to help explain curved versus straight geodesics for one of the problems our student had to do in calculus of variations. I then "assigned" my students to do this the next time they went to the local ice cream place.

(Tip of the cap to Jeremy Kun.)

Think Globally

The latest New York Times article by Steve Strogatz is called "Think Globally", which is pretty ironic (despite the applications to earth's geodesics) given that the article is about differential geometry, which is inherently local. Maybe that's the "act locally" part? And it just warms my heart to see an article about differential geometry in the New York Times. Where are the wedge products, though? :)