Sunday 14 February 2010

The Mathematician's Valentine, etc.

Yes, I really will type up my Astrofest notes soon!

In the meantime - you must seriously check out the Mathematician's Valentine. Shapes, folds, Mobius-strips-turned-no-longer-Mobius-strips, graphs, equations, and finally sweets to fall back on - plus the, er, true heart-throb, fail-safe, sweep-'em-off-their feet poem:

Roses are red.
Violets are approximately blue.
A paracompact manifold with a Lorentzian metric,
can be a spacetime, if it has dimension greater than or equal to two.

(I suppose I should add that no really mathematically inclined person I've showed it to seems impressed yet. But I loved it.)

To mark the occasion of today, or probably rather choosing today as an excellent opportunity to cover something I hadn't realised was regarded as a long-standing mystery, ZookeeperChris wrote an Object of the Day about "The Heart Galaxy", or SDSS 587729227151704160.


If you're more patient with mysterious computer simulations than me, you'll do much better at the Galaxy Zoo Mergers project,which is featuring this galaxy today. Chris has a Masters student named Georgia Barrie studying the rings, who tells us that she will be sharing the results of the world's largest ring catalogue with us soon. Good to meet you Georgia, and I look forward to it!

And totally off-topic but not least, many congratulations to Zookeeper Karen, who's just produced her 2nd addition to her family!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

still a pleasure to read you, keep at it X

Alice said...

Thanks very much Leslie, especially as this was a throw-it-all-together post! Keep coming - I have plans for a load of cool stuff to write . . . :-)