An Icosahedral Pecan Pie

In 2009 or thereabouts, Charless Fowlkes and his collaborators made a large icosahedral pecan pie.

Just don't roll a 1 on this 20-sided die.

(Tip of the cap to Karen Kustedjo.)

Romans and the d12 Gaming System

It was clearly for the d12 system of role-playing games. :)

(Tip of the cap to GrrlScientist.)

The Romans left over one hundred of these dodecahedrons across Europe, but we can only speculate their purpose pic.twitter.com/YvlWgbS4AB

— History Lovers Club (@historylvrsclub) November 26, 2017

Tales from the ArXiv: Lyapunov Exponents and Dungeons & Dragons Dice

My latest 'favorite' figure caption —— to slightly abuse the term 'favorite', because it means I really like it but need not necessarily be my literal favorite —— from a math paper comes from today's arXiv offering from Amie Wilkinson.

This paper is an expository mathematical look at Lyapunov exponents and why they're interesting. It is based on Wilkinson's 2016 JMM current-events lecture.

By the way, Amie Wilkinson is the example I have broached when I brought up to mathematicians whether somebody who missed the age-40 Fields Medal would have gotten one if life breaks, etc. were taken into account. I think she probably would have gotten one.

Ancient Egyptian d20

Apparently, Ancient Egyptians made small model icosohedrons (i.e., d20s, for those with a role-playing game bent).

One day, I hope that somebody unearths a character sheet, written in hieroglyphics, that was buried with an ancient Egyptian royal.

(Tip of the cap to Steven Wilson.)