Spring 2003

MT-A125 Seminar in Mathematics: Infinity, the Fourth Dimension, Primes and Chaos: Mathematical Thinking in the Real World

Web Links

Collected here are web links to pages related to topics we investigate during the semester.

Click and Clack posed a "two glasses of water" puzzle in May 2001; more puzzles from "Car Talk" in their archive (for Chapter 1).
Examples applying the pigeon-hole principle (some are to deeper mathematics), and more examples (for Section 2.1).
A wealth of information and activities about Fibonacci Numbers and the Golden Ratio (for Section 2.2)
A prime site for prime numbers (for Section 2.3)
A selection of sites about Fermat's Last Theorem as indexed at Yahoo (for Section 2.3)
Information about unsolved prime problems (for Section 2.3)
You, too, can use full-strength public key codes (for Section 2.5)
Alas, only a finite number of sites about infinity: an on-line course on infinity (at the University of Michigan); a brief tour of infinity ( a personal collection of pages by a web citizen); FAQ on large numbers (at the Math Forum); the Hilbert's Hotel page we used in class (at the University of Michigan site);another version of the Hilbert (or Cardinality) Hotel story (a page from the MegaMath project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory) (for Chapter 3).
A page on the golden section in art and building (for Section 4.3)
A page at the Geometry Junkyard about tiling - look at the picture at the bottom of the page! A page on tilings related to our pinwheel tilings (for Section 4.4)
Stretch out into the twilight zone with these sites on the fourth dimension: Links to various fourth dimension resources; the reading for Monday 3/17, "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" by Edwin A. Abbott; "... And He Built a Crooked House --" by Robert A. Heinlein; the reading for Wednesday 3/19; short movies illustrating fourth dimension principles, used in a math course at Union College; short movies illustrating hyperspace structures, at Loughborough University in the U.K.; a student paper on the fourth dimension and art (with links to artwork, or see the Gallery page); a whimsical piece of luggage (for Section 4.7).
More twists on Möbius bands and Klein bottles: Math That Makes You Go Wow (student work for a multi-disciplinary course at Yale); an animated crab swims in the surface of a Klein bottle (see also the game site below); Klein bottle + limericks (part of a larger site on the fourth dimension);games played on the surface of a torus or a Klein bottle; buy a Klein bottle (or not?) (for Section 5.2).
To be or knot to be - an exhibit of knots (for Section 5.4).
Dead or alive? - sites catalogued at Yahoo for Conway's Game of Life - also for online java examples; one nice page is www.math.com's (for Section 6.2).
Among the chaos of fractal pages, these applets by Bob Devaney (at Boston University) are gems (for Section 6.3).

Back to WELCOME	Back to Spring 2003
Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Computer Science	Saint Louis University
Last Modified: March 28, 2003	email webmaster: blythrd[at]slu[dot]edu

The contents of this site have not been approved by the Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Computer Science, the College of Arts and Sciences, or by Saint Louis University.

Spring 2003MT-A125 Seminar in Mathematics: Infinity, the Fourth Dimension, Primes and Chaos: Mathematical Thinking in the Real World

Web Links

Spring 2003

MT-A125 Seminar in Mathematics: Infinity, the Fourth Dimension, Primes and Chaos: Mathematical Thinking in the Real World