August 8 – Universal and International Infinity Day

Posted on August 8, 2016

Have you ever seen the symbol for infinity?

Can you see why Infinity Day is the eighth day of the eighth month?

This holiday was first thought up by philosopher and writer Jean-Pierre Ady Fenyo, in 1987. He promoted his holiday a bit in New York, where he was living at the time, and later in a few other cities in the U.S. and Europe. It's supposed to be a day to promote philosophy for all.

Infinity is a concept of being without limit. The example often given is the counting numbers...No matter how large your number is, you can always make it larger by merely adding 1 to it.

• Learn about infinity...at Math Is Fun and at Plus Maths. 

• Listen to this Infinity Song or check out this 3-minute video on infinity. 

(By the way, I have a bit of a problem with the end of the 3-minute video I linked to, above. I think that the speaker wanted to end on a positive, feel-good note, but he said something like, at any given moment, we have access to infinite choices. I simply do not think that is at all true. I wonder what other mathematicians, as well as scientists and philosophers, would say about people having infinite choices...?)

• I always feel like I am approaching infinity when I watch a Mandelbrot Set zoom. This one and this one are good examples – and this one in 3-D – but there are many more!

• Other examples of times we use the word "infinite" include the Mobius strip... 

..."infinity pools"... 

...and the theoretical possibility of infinite universes.

Also on this date:

Independence Day for Bhutan 

Art Day

Earth Overshoot Day 

Anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone of Uraniborg

Sneak Some Zucchini onto Your Neighbor's Porch Night

Peasants' Day in Tanzania

Physicist Ernest Lawrence's birthday

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

• August holidays
• August birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in August

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

• September holidays
• September birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in September

June 3 – National Repeat Day

Posted on June 3, 2015

Most of the websites that mention this day are pretty cutesy with the write-ups...with lots of repetition like this:

It's National Repeat Day!

It's National Repeat Day!

And the suggested “celebrations” seem sort of...umm...un-fun. Like I read this suggestion: when you put your socks on, this morning, take them off and then put them on again.

Really? That's how we want to use National Repeat Day? To make more work for ourselves with no added benefit?

How about this, instead:

The power of repetition

Author Robert Collier once said: 

In the classic movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray learns that it isn't enough just to repeat a day...you have to try doing different things while repeating the day. You have to learn from what works – and what doesn't work.

When writing computer programs, you soon learn the power of repetition, or rather recursion. 

Recursion is when a computer routine calls upon
itself. It's like a picture of a guy painting a picture
of that same guy painting a picture of that same
guy painting a picture...

You can explore recursion yourself by taking a recursive
self portrait where two mirrors face one another!

When investigating fractals, again, there is amazing power of repetition. One way to start an investigation of fractals is to investigate a stalk of broccoli. Tear it down to smaller and smaller pieces – and each piece looks a lot like the whole!  You can also doodle fractals like Vi Hart. 

Someone made a video about making a video about how Vi Hart makes a video! A recursive video!

Repetition through recursion in computer graphics can turn a simple line of code that tells the computer to draw a circle into something utterly magnificent:

Also on this date:

Anniversary of the first American spacewalk

Anniversary of De Soto claiming La Florida for Spain

Chimborazo Day

Geologist James Hutton's birthday

Anniversary of tonsillitis striking Elvis Presley and Ringo Starr

Plan ahead:
Check out my Pinterest boards for:

• June holidays
• June birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in June

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

• July holidays
• July birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in July

November 20 – Happy Birthday, Benoit Mandelbrot

Posted on November 20, 2013

A “theory of roughness” in nature;

.....a new sort of geometry to explain “random” and chaotic phenomena;

............a complicated life.

Benoit Mandelbrot was from a Jewish Lithuanian family, but he was born in Poland. As a child, his family fled from the Nazis to Paris, where they stayed with an uncle who was a mathematician. Mandelbrot was pretty sure that his uncle saved their lives, and we can be pretty sure that his uncle also influenced Mandelbrot's interest in mathematics.

After World War II, Mandelbrot lived in France and in the U.S. He had dual citizenship, he attended and earned degrees from universities in both countries, and he held positions in institutes and universities in both countries. I guess that makes him a Polish-born French-American man with Lithuanian roots!

I don't know if that distinctly non-settled sort of life led to Mandelbrot studying complex shapes in nature, but he ended up developing an entirely new sort of geometry: fractal geometry.

What is a fractal?

A fractal is a curve or figure that has a self-similar pattern at every scale. For example, a snowflake has a beautifully symmetrical but complex shape. If you zoom in on any one part of the snowflake, you will see details that have similar angles and symmetries to those seen in the whole snowflake. Zoom in farther, and you will see even more complexities and details that are again similar to the whole.

Self-similarity and complexity can be seen in many different places in nature, such as eroded coastlines, clouds, crystals, or galaxies.

• Check out the Mandelbrot set!

• I love me some fractals! I have pulled together a bunch more fractal links and even an idea or two for fractal crafts on a Fractal Pinterest board.

Also on this Date:

Globally Organized Hug A Runner Day 

Countdown to turkey 

Happy Inventions Day

Astronomer Edwin Hubble's birthday 

Teachers' Day in Vietnam

Geographic Information Systems Day

Plan Ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

• November holidays
• November birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in November
  

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

• December holidays 
• December birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in December
  

October 11, 2011 Happy Birthday, Lewis F. Richardson

(and me!)

Have you ever wondered what “higher mathematics” is used for?

Well, Lewis Richardson (born on this day in 1881) used math to forecast weather—and even to study the causes and prevention of war! Richardson also did pioneering work on fractals as he studied the measurement of coastlines and borders. In addition to being a mathematician, Richardson was a physicist, psychologist, and pacifist.

What, what, and what?

• Pioneer: One who settles land that is far from already established towns and cities. OR one who works in a newly-established area of science, technology, etc.
• Physicist: One who studies the matter, energy, and forces of the universe.
• Psychologist: One who studies human behavior and mental processes.
• Pacifist: One who believes that disputes between nations and peoples can and should be settled without war or violence.

What's up with the weather?

Weather is really hard to accurately predict because there are so many factors that affect it, because the atmosphere is chaotic, and because it takes massive computing power to solve the equations that describe the atmosphere.

Richardson suggested using differential equations to forecast weather—and he was right, that's what we use today—but there were no computers or electronic calculators back then. An attempt he made to predict the weather through equations was really off, because he didn't use what we now call smoothing techniques. However, when a modern analyst applied these techniques to Richardson's work, he found out that Richardson's equations were essentially correct. This is considered a remarkable achievement, since he solved the equations by hand while working for an ambulance service.

Of course, Richardson's technique couldn't work while “computers” and “calculators” still mean a bunch of people sitting around solving equations. By the time human computers solved the equations, the forecast was already long out of date. Even the first computers used in weather forecasting took 24 hours to produce a 24-hour forecast.

Nowadays, we have a lot more data to help make our weather predictions—including satellite data and worldwide instruments—and of course we have huge computers to work on all that data. Still, we can only forecast about 10 to 16 days in the future, and our predictions get less accurate near the end of those forecast periods.

War and Borders and Fractals

In his research about war between neighboring countries, Richardson looked for data about length of borders and coastlines, in an effort to find out if there was a correlation between length of borders and frequency of war. However, he found out that different sources gave very different figures for the length of any particular border. He began to research how people made these measurements, and he found out that the smaller the ruler used to measure a coastline or border, the larger the resulting length. To see why, look at these pictures of measurements of the coastline of the British isle:

This Richardson Effect is now considered one part of the birth of the mathematics of fractals.

For more on coastlines and fractals, go here, here, or here.