The Beauty of Roots (2011)

http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/roots/

by rutenspitz • 12 years ago

139 12 12 years ago

math.ucr.edu

moyix• 12 years ago

It impresses me to no end that Greg Egan, a talented science fiction writer [1], finds time to contribute to mathematical curiosities like this! I suppose it keeps him sharp, given that his novels often involve a lot of heavy math.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan

aswanson2• 12 years ago

+1 for the intro to Egan. Going to look into his work.

JamesArgo• 12 years ago

He's an extraordinary accomplished writer. I recommend his short story collection, Axiomatic, as a great introduction to his work.

based2• 12 years ago

http://www.reddit.com/r/mathpics/comments/gk6e2/the_beauty_o...

agumonkey• 12 years ago

Reminds me of www.oftenpaper.net/sierpinski.htm

asaddhamani• 12 years ago

For some reason, I read this as "The Beauty of Robots".

mkl• 12 years ago

Previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980043 about an older version of the page with some different info, http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week285.html

Renaud• 12 years ago

I often regret not having made more efforts to study Maths when I was younger.

I see the joy of being drawn into these fun explorations and I regret that these were not used in class to entice kids into wanting to go beyond dry textbooks that focused on theory and never tied the material being taught with anything remotely exciting.

msandford• 12 years ago

I can't help but think that the reason some of those holes have serrated edges is due to the problems representing the actual numbers with floats. I can't say for sure, it's really just a hunch. The patterns are fascinating either way.

arantius• 12 years ago

At least the bulk of the article was discussing data explicitly described as being generated by Mathematica, which is capable of arbitrary precision. It seems just as likely that this mode was used.

itazula• 12 years ago

Seeing something spectacular like this really makes me feel that life is too short. Beautiful!

The Beauty of Roots (2011)

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