Visualizations, Inspirations, and the Super Ultimate Graphing Challenge

Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

Jason Davies

Meet Jason Davies, a freelance mathematician living in the UK. Growing up in Wales (one of the 4 countries of the United Kingdom) his classes were taught in Welsh. This makes Jason one of only about 611,000 people that speak the language, only 21.7% of the population of Wales! Imagine if only 1/5 of France spoke French!! These statistics are from a 2004 study, so the numbers may have changed a bit, but they still say something interesting don’t they?

Prime Seive

Jason is all about what numbers and pictures can tell us.  Since graduating from Cambridge, he’s been doing all sorts of data visualization and computer science on his own for various companies and IT firms. I originally found Jason through a link to his Prime Seive visualization, but take a look at his gallery and you’re bound to find something beautiful, interesting, interactive, and cool. I’ve linked to some of my favorites below.

Interactive Apollonian Gasket

Rhodonea Curves

Set Partitions

I asked Jason a few questions about his interest in data visualization and math in general. Here’s a tasty little excerpt:

MM: What’s the most important trait for a mathematician to have? Is there one?

JD: Persistance is always useful in maths! I think the stereotype is to be analytical and logical, but in fact there are many other traits that are highly important, for instance communication skills. Mathematics is passed on from person to person, after all, so being able to communicate ideas effectively is dynamite.

MM: Do you have a message you’d like to give to young mathematicians?

JD: The world needs you!

Read the rest in our Q&A with Jason Davies, and you can see all of our interviews on the Q&A page we’ve just created.

Up next, a beautiful and inspiring video from Spain. The video is actually called Insprations, and it comes to us from Etérea Studios, the online home of animator Cristóbal Vila. In the intro he says, “I looked into that enormous and inexhaustible source of inspiration that is Escher and tried to imagine how it could be his workplace, what things would surround an artist like him, so deeply interested in science in general and mathematics in particular.”

I’d die to have an office like this!

It gets better.  Cristóbal added a page explaining all of the wonderful maths in the video. Click to read about Platonic solids, tilings, tangrams, and various works of art by M.C. Escher.

Finally, a nifty new game that explores the relationship between graphs and different kinds of motion. Super Ultimate Graphing Challenge is a game developed by Physics teacher Matthew Blackman to help his students understand the physics and mathematics of motion. You might not understand it all when you start, but keep playing and see what you can make of it. If you need a bit of help or have something to say, post it in our comments, and we’ll happily reply.

Bon appetit!