A Compendium of Cool Internet Math Things

Here’s an experience I’ve had roughly six million times.

1. A mathematical topic arises.
2. “You know,” I say, “someone has a great tweet about this… somewhere…”
3. In order to find it, I am forced to read all of the tweets, ever.
4. I am reminded that “all of the tweets ever” is rather too many tweets.

So about a year ago I started a compendium. Tweets, yes, but also videos, apps, memes… anything stimulating or arresting that I can use to embroider my lessons. For a while, this document lived where all important documents live: as a gmail draft. But now I share it as a blog post, and I intend to continue updating it as new ones cross my ken.

NOTE: I will, where convenient, use screenshots and links, because WordPress’s embedded tweets sometimes take ages to load.

NUMBER AND SCALE

A very strange pricing scheme:

A brilliant anagram from Colin Beveridge:

A gorgeous visualization of prime factors (from this Smithsonian blog post).

The timeless classic Powers of Ten, arguably the best film of 1977 (suck it, Annie Hall):

The mesmerizing interactive “Scale of the Universe” app (which requires you to enable Flash, but just do it).

Also, this black hole:

ALGEBRA

Four-story slides shaped like parabolas:

An ellipse as the maximum heights of a family of projectiles:

And again, this time for figuring out the scoring system in Australian Rules Football:

Four place mats, arranged to make a quadratic identity at the dinner table:

Polar coordinates on pizza:

Volumes of a cylinder, a sphere, and a cone:

Volumes of earth, earth’s air, and earth’s water:

Animated visual proof that any polygon can be rearranged into any other polygon of equal area:

(You’ve just got to click here, it’s amazing.)

For your trigonometric Halloween, the blood function:

Defining a radian with a wooden model:

Simple harmonic motion:

CALCULUS AND DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS

Riemann sums (comparing upper and lower sums as the grid is refined):

A professor solves an optimization problem (“smallest surface area for a given volume”), writes a company that makes cat food to ask why they don’t use this solution, and receives an incredibly thoughtful and interesting reply:

A real-life butterfly effect:

The exquisite sensitivity of the double pendulum:

PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS

Independence is a delicate and rare phenomenon:

What do probabilistic words really mean?

I see you Anscombe’s Quartet, and I raise you the Datasaurus:

The dangers of using r^2 as an effect size estimate:

The normal distribution in action:

MISCELLANEOUS