Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing magic, scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literature – especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was a leading authority on Lewis Carroll; The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century". He was considered the doyen of American puzzlers. He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.
Recreational mathematics is mathematics carried out for recreation (entertainment) rather than as a strictly research- and application-based professional activity or as a part of a student's formal education. Although it is not necessarily limited to being an endeavor for amateurs, many topics in this field require no knowledge of advanced mathematics. Recreational mathematics involves mathematical puzzles and games, often appealing to children and untrained adults and inspiring their further study of the subject.
A polyomino is a plane geometric figure formed by joining one or more equal squares edge to edge. It is a polyform whose cells are squares. It may be regarded as a finite subset of the regular square tiling.
In geometry, flexagons are flat models, usually constructed by folding strips of paper, that can be flexed or folded in certain ways to reveal faces besides the two that were originally on the back and front.
The discipline of origami or paper folding has received a considerable amount of mathematical study. Fields of interest include a given paper model's flat-foldability, and the use of paper folds to solve up-to cubic mathematical equations.
A polycube is a solid figure formed by joining one or more equal cubes face to face. Polycubes are the three-dimensional analogues of the planar polyominoes. The Soma cube, the Bedlam cube, the Diabolical cube, the Slothouber–Graatsma puzzle, and the Conway puzzle are examples of packing problems based on polycubes.
Erik D. Demaine is a Canadian-American professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former child prodigy.
In geometry, a net of a polyhedron is an arrangement of non-overlapping edge-joined polygons in the plane which can be folded to become the faces of the polyhedron. Polyhedral nets are a useful aid to the study of polyhedra and solid geometry in general, as they allow for physical models of polyhedra to be constructed from material such as thin cardboard.
The crossed ladders problem is a puzzle of unknown origin that has appeared in various publications and regularly reappears in Web pages and Usenet discussions.
In geometry, a straight skeleton is a method of representing a polygon by a topological skeleton. It is similar in some ways to the medial axis but differs in that the skeleton is composed of straight line segments, while the medial axis of a polygon may involve parabolic curves. However, both are homotopy-equivalent to the underlying polygon.
Rigid origami is a branch of origami which is concerned with folding structures using flat rigid sheets joined by hinges. That is, unlike in traditional origami, the panels of the paper cannot be bent during the folding process; they must remain flat at all times, and the paper only folded along its hinges. A rigid origami model would still be foldable if it was made from glass sheets with hinges in place of its crease lines.
Martin L. (Marty) Demaine is an artist and mathematician, the Angelika and Barton Weller artist in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In the mathematics of paper folding, map folding and stamp folding are two problems of counting the number of ways that a piece of paper can be folded. In the stamp folding problem, the paper is a strip of stamps with creases between them, and the folds must lie on the creases. In the map folding problem, the paper is a map, divided by creases into rectangles, and the folds must again lie only along these creases.
In a publishing career spanning 80 years (1930–2010), popular mathematics and science writer Martin Gardner (1914–2010) authored or edited over 100 books and countless articles, columns and reviews.
Anna Lubiw is a computer scientist known for her work in computational geometry and graph theory. She is currently a professor at the University of Waterloo.
David Anthony Klarner was an American mathematician, author, and educator. He is known for his work in combinatorial enumeration, polyominoes, and box-packing.
Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra is a monograph on the mathematics and computational geometry of mechanical linkages, paper folding, and polyhedral nets, by Erik Demaine and Joseph O'Rourke. It was published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press (ISBN 978-0-521-85757-4). A Japanese-language translation by Ryuhei Uehara was published in 2009 by the Modern Science Company (ISBN 978-4-7649-0377-7).
In the geometry of convex polyhedra, blooming or continuous blooming is a continuous three-dimensional motion of the surface of the polyhedron, cut to form a polyhedral net, from the polyhedron into a flat and non-self-overlapping placement of the net in a plane. As in rigid origami, the polygons of the net must remain individually flat throughout the motion, and are not allowed to intersect or cross through each other. A blooming, reversed to go from the flat net to a polyhedron, can be thought of intuitively as a way to fold the polyhedron from a paper net without bending the paper except at its designated creases.
In computational geometry, the source unfolding of a convex polyhedron is a net obtained by cutting the polyhedron along the cut locus of a point on the surface of the polyhedron. The cut locus of a point consists of all points on the surface that have two or more shortest geodesics to . For every convex polyhedron, and every choice of the point on its surface, cutting the polyhedron on the cut locus will produce a result that can be unfolded into a flat plane, producing the source unfolding. The resulting net may, however, cut across some of the faces of the polyhedron rather than only cutting along its edges.
In geometry, a common net is a net that can be folded onto several polyhedra. To be a valid common net, there shouldn't exist any non-overlapping sides and the resulting polyhedra must be connected through faces. The research of examples of this particular nets dates back to the end of the 20th century, despite that, not many examples have been found. Two classes, however, have been deeply explored, regular polyhedra and cuboids. The search of common nets is usually made by either extensive search or the overlapping of nets that tile the plane.
