Related papers: The mathematics of taffy pullers
The Teichmueller polynomial of a fibered 3-manifold plays a useful role in the construction of mapping class having small stretch factor. We provide an algorithm that computes this polynomial of the fibered face associated to a…
We discuss a couple of examples of Markov chains. This note is written primarily for school students; it is based on a lecture given by the first author at a Math Circle at NAS (www.assagames.com/nas).
The optimal one-sided parametric polynomial approximants of a circular arc are considered. More precisely, the approximant must be entirely in or out of the underlying circle of an arc. The natural restriction to an arc's approximants…
We construct various novel and elementary examples of dynamics with metric attractors that have intermingled basins. A main ingredient is the introduction of random walks along orbits of a given dynamical system. We develop theory for it…
Math is widely considered as a powerful tool and its strong appeal depends on the high level of abstraction it allows in modelling a huge number of heterogeneous phenomena and problems, spanning from the static of buildings to the flight of…
Hard spheres are ubiquitous in condensed matter: they have been used as models for liquids, crystals, colloidal systems, granular systems, and powders. Packings of hard spheres are of even wider interest, as they are related to important…
A divide on an orientable 2-orbifold gives rise to a fibration of the unit tangent bundle to the orbifold.We characterize the corresponding monodromies as exactly the products of a left-veering horizontal and a right-veering vertical…
We show that a moment-angle manifold associated to a neighbourly triangulation of an odd dimensional sphere is homotopy equivalent to a connected sum of products of two spheres, resolving a problem of Buchstaber and Panov. The methods are…
We consider the operation to crush a subset of a manifold to one-point when the result of the crushing also be a manifold. Then the Poincare conjecture is split to two problems; for any closed orientable 3-manifold which is not homeomorphic…
We first review the description of flag manifolds in terms of Pluecker coordinates and coherent states. Using this description, we construct fuzzy versions of the algebra of functions on these spaces in both operatorial and star product…
We describe a new type of top, the twisted top, obtained by appending a cocycle to the Lie-Poisson bracket for the charged heavy top, thus breaking its semidirect product structure. The twisted top has an integrable case that corresponds to…
Sphere eversions have been described so far by either pictures with minimal topological complexity, numerical evolution or complex equations. We write down relatively simple explicit formulas for the whole eversion, both analytic and…
In discrete geometry, the contact number of a given finite number of non-overlapping spheres was introduced as a generalization of Newton's kissing number. This notion has not only led to interesting mathematics, but has also found…
We propose a new class of space-filling designs called rotated sphere packing designs for computer experiments. The approach starts from the asymptotically optimal positioning of identical balls that covers the unit cube. Properly scaled,…
It is shown that the toy Turing Tumble, suitably extended with an infinitely long game board and unlimited supply of pieces, is Turing-Complete. This is achieved via direct simulation of a Turing machine. Unlike previously informally…
We give a more detailed description of the new system of Pl\"ucker-like equations from [4], discuss how it relates to the usual Pl\"ucker equations, and correct a mistake in that article.
In this paper, we introduce twisted virtual doodles, defined as stable equivalence classes of immersed circles on closed surfaces that may be non-orientable. These objects admit planar representative diagrams, considered up to a suitable…
We discuss twisted cohomology, not just for ordinary cohomology but also for $K$-theory and other exceptional cohomology theories, and discuss several of the applications of these in mathematical physics. Our list of applications is by no…
We consider the problem of determining the length of the shortest paths between points on the surfaces of tetrahedra and cubes. Our approach parallels the concept of Alexandrov's star unfolding but focuses on specific polyhedra and uses…
We give an overview of various counting problems for Apollonian circle packings, which turn out to be related to problems in dynamics and number theory for thin groups. This survey article is an expanded version of my lecture notes prepared…