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G4G Weekly Socials
Our weekly Socials are held on Sunday at 12 noon Atlanta time (check the time for you here).
We are using the Zoom Meeting platform here (not Zoom Webinar as we do for our monthly CoM presentations on the 21st). So for these Sundays socials we will all be able to see each other.
Upcoming Sessions:Sun 16 Jul – Rediscovering Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column from Scientific American with Scott KimWe welcome theme suggestions for the G4G Weekend Socials. All information can be found here.
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G4G Weekly Socials: New Recuring Theme
Starting this Sunday 16 of July, and every third Sunday of the Month that follows, we are introducing a new recuring theme: “Rediscovering Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column from Scientific American”.
In November 1958 Martin Gardner chose Squared Squares as the subject of his Mathematical Games column and the 33 x 32 squared rectangle of Z. Moroń was featured on the magazine cover. William Tutte, best known for his work in graph theory and breaking codes in WWII, wrote an article for the column on how the square was squared by himself and his Trinity undergraduate colleagues, Brooks, Smith, and Stone. Tutte's article in Gardner's column had an electrifying effect on me when I was a teenager. I'll discuss highlights of this wonderful column, and showcase the wonderful work of Stuart Errol Anderson who built a comprehensive site on this topic, as well as my own extensions to the problem.
Wow! I am looking forward to this series, this topic, and Scott Kim’s extensions to the problem.
Story – Back when MoMath was starting up, The Gathering made some suggestions for exhibits. One idea was to have a Manipulative puzzle based on the 112×122 squared square. I built a prototype puzzle, shown in the PDF at the link below. Our suggestion was dismissed because pcs would wander off. Fair enough.
Soon after, MathFest visited Portland, so we had the puzzle at the G4G Booth when many had fun playing with it. (Also shown in the PDF.)
A lot of the same background info that Scott cites is in the PDF, which was created from a page the Gathering 4 Gardner website at the time.
http://www.dialectrix.com/G4G/SquaringTheSquare.pdf