Fermat's Library

Mars' Olympus Mons, the tallest known volcano in the solar system, has such a gradual slope that someone standing at the base couldn't see the summit because it's beyond the horizon.

This week’s paper explores how slime mold can inspire better network design. Atsushi Tero and his team explore how the slime mold Physarum polycephalum can inspire more efficient and adaptive networks. Just as neural networks mimic the brain and genetic algorithms draw from evolution, this research applies biology to solve complex network challenges. Paper here: https://lnkd.in/dv4CBMnz

Here's a great photo of the ISS by J. Mccarthy. The reason why the ISS keeps its relative size against both the Sun and the Moon is due to a remarkable coincidence: the diameter of the Moon is 400x smaller than the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 400x closer to us!

Richard Feynman's pranks at Los Alamos "Feynman drove security personnel to distraction when he went on a nighttime safecracking spree, opening the combination locks for secret file cabinets all over the laboratory. On another occasion, he noticed a hole in the fence surrounding Los Alamos - so he walked out the main gate, waved to the guard, and then crawled back through the hole and walked out the main gate again. He repeated this several times. Feynman was almost arrested. His antics became part of Los Alamos lore"

In 1666, Newton determined π to 16 places using 22 terms of this series. He then wrote: "I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried these computations, having no other business at the time"

Can you decipher the meaning of this license plate?

Happy π day! 3.1415926535897 93238462643383 27 950 288 4 197 16 939 93 751 05 8 2097 49445 9230 781

Here's the formula for the largest number of pieces that can be produced from slicing a doughnut with n cuts. 13 pieces with 3 cuts.

Here's an example of a problem from the first International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) whose solution is accessible to anyone with basic understanding of math. Solution: If the fraction is irreducible it means the denominator and numerator have no common divisors. Assuming k divides 21n+4 and 14n+3, then k also divides 2(21n+4)=42n+8 and 3(14n+3)=42n+9 as well as the difference (42n+9)-(42n+8)=1 - we conclude that the only common divisor is 1!

If you put a spherical loaf of bread through a bread slicer, then each slice comes out with equal crust