# Carnival of Mathematics #209

Welcome to the 209th Carnival of Mathematics!

209 has a few distinctions, including being the smallest number with 6 representations as a sum of 3 positive squares:

\begin{aligned}209 &= 1^2 + 8^2 + 12^2 \\ &= 2^2 + 3^2 + 14^2 \\ &= 2^2 + 6^2 + 13^2 \\ &= 3^2 + 10^2 + 10^2 \\ &= 4^2 + 7^2 + 12^2 \\ &= 8^2 + 8^2 + 9^2 \end{aligned}

As well as being the 43rd Ulam number, the number of partitions of 16 into relatively prime parts and the number of partitions of 63 into squares.

Be sure to submit fun math you find in October to the next carvinal host!

The Heidelberg Laureate forum took place, which featured lectures from renowned mathematicians and computer scientists, like Rob Tarjan and Avi Wigderson on the CS theory side, as well as a panel discussion on post-quantum cryptography with none other than Vint Cerf, Whitfield Diffie, and Adi Shamir. All the videos are on YouTube.

Tom Edgar, who is behind the Mathematical Visual Proofs YouTube channel, published a video (using manim) exploring for which $n$ it is possible to divide a disk into $n$ equal pieces using a straightedge and compass. It was based on a proof from Roger Nelsen’s and Claudi Alsina’s book, “Icons of Mathematics”.

The folks at Ganit Charcha also published a talk “Fascinating Facts About Pi” from a Pi Day 2022 celebration. The video includes a question that was new to me about interpreting subsequences of pi digits as indexes and doing reverse lookups until you find a loop.

Henry Segerman published two nice videos, including one on an illusion of a square and circle in the same shape, and a preview of a genus-2 holonomy maze (Augh, my wallet! I have both of his original holonomy mazes and my houseguests love playing with them!)

Steve Mould published a nice video about the Chladni figures used (or adapted) in the new Lord of the Rings TV series’ title sequence.

The Simons institute has been doing a workshop on graph limits, which aims to cover some of the theory about things like low-rank matrix completion, random graphs, and various models of networks. Their lectures are posted on their YouTube page.

Peter Rowlett shared a nice activity with his son about distinct colorings of a square divided into four triangular regions.

Krystal Guo showed off her approach to LiveTeX’ing lectures.

Tamás Görbe gave a nice thread about a function that enumerates all rational numbers exactly once.

Every math club leader should be called the Prime Minister.

In doing research for my book, I was writing a chapter on balanced incomplete block designs, and I found a few nice tidbits in threads (thread 1, thread 2). A few here: Latin squares were on Islamic amulets from the 1200’s. The entire back catalog of “The Mathematical Scientist” journal is available on Google Drive, and through it I found an old article describing the very first use of Latin squares for experimental design, in which a man ran an experiment on what crop was best to feed his sheep during the winter months in France in the 1800’s. Finally, I determined that NFL season scheduling is done via integer linear programming.

## Math Bloggers

Lúcás Meier published a nice article at the end of August (which I only discovered in September, it counts!) going over the details of his favorite cryptography paper “Unifying Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Knowledge”, by Ueli Maurer, which gives a single zero-knowledge protocol that generalizes Schnorr, Fiat-Shamir, and a few others for proving knowledge of logarithms and roots.

Ralph Levien published a blog post about how to efficiently draw a decent approximation to the curve parallel to a given cubic Bezier curve. He has a previous blog post about fitting cubic Beziers to data, and a variety of other interesting graphics-inspired math articles in between articles about Rust and GPUs.

# Carnival of Mathematics #197

Welcome to the 197th Carnival of Mathematics!

197 is an unseemly number, as you can tell by the Wikipedia page which currently says that it has “indiscriminate, excessive, or irrelevant examples.” How deviant. It’s also a Repfigit, which means if you start a fibonacci-type sequence with the digits 1, 9, 7, and then continue with $a_n = a_{i-3} + a_{i-2} + a_{i-1}$, then 197 shows up in the sequence. Indeed: 1, 9, 7, 17, 33, 57, 107, 197, …

## Untangling the unknot

Kennan Crane et al showcased a new paper that can untangle tangled curves quickly, and can do things like generate Hilbert-type space-filling curves on surfaces. It’s a long thread with tons of links to videos and reading materials, covering energy functions, functional analysis, Sobolev methods, and a custom inner product.

## Folding equilateral triangles without measuring

Dave Richeson shows off a neat technique for folding equilateral triangles using just paper and no measurements. Replies in the thread show the geometric series that converges to the right 60 degree angle.

## Shots fired at UMAP and t-SNE

Lior Pachter et al. study what sorts of structure are preserved by dimensionality reduction techniques like UMAP (which I have also used in a previous article) by comparing it against a genomics dataset with understood structure. They make some big claims about how UMAP and t-SNE destroy important structure, and they show how to contrive the dimensionality reduction plot to look like an elephant even when there’s no elephantine structure in the data.

I’m not expert, but perhaps one best case scenario for UMAP enthusiasts would be that their analysis only applies when you go from very high dimensions down to 2 just so you can plot a picture. But if you stop at, say, $\sqrt{n}$ dimensions, you might still preserve a lot of the meaningful structure. Either way, they make a convincing pitch for Johnson-Lindenstrauss’s random linear reductions, which I’ve also covered here. Their paper is on biorXiv.

## Studying the Sieve

Ben Peters Jones took up Grant Sanderson’s math video challenge and released a series of videos studying the Sieve of Eratosthenes.