Welcome to this week’s Math Munch! We’ve got a full plate for you.
Vi Hart is a “recreational mathemusician,” which means she spends a lot of her free time making math, music, and art of all kinds. She is best known for her “doodling in math class” videos, but her website is full of cool and creative projects. This week we’re featuring Vi’s balloon art. There are lots of cool pictures and instructions to make your own balloon creations!
Next up, Landon Curt Noll is a number theorist, computer scientist, and astronomer who does and makes all kinds of cool things. Three different times, he discovered the largest prime numbers anyone had ever found! Here’s a link to his list of curious patterns in the prime numbers. In another venture, Landon wrote a neat little program that tells you the English name of a number. How do you pronounce 1,213,141,516,171,819? Give it a try. I know million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, and quintillion, but what’s after that? Check it out: Landon lists the first 10,000 powers of ten!
Finally, the connections between math and music often inspire awesome creations. Here’s a beautiful video by Michael John Blake in which he converts the digits of pi to notes, and we get to hear what pi sounds like.
Here’s a similar video by Lars Erickson who wrote an entire symphony based on the idea. “The Pi Symphony” also includes the sound of e, another important math number which is about 2.71828…