'How would you explain the concept of eigenvectors to a child?' asks jay_13. A few years ago I tried to do something like that – to explain eigenvectors intuitively, in five minutes, with no pictures, just words. youtube.com/watch?v=AXk12z…

Currently reading “The Joy Of X” by Steven Strogatz

This book is great. Recommended for anyone who loves and/or hates mathematics.

#math #BooksWorthReading

After a lecture by mathematician Mark Kac at Caltech, Richard Feynman got up and said: 'If all mathematics disappeared, it would set physics back precisely one week.' Without a pause, Kac responded: 'Precisely the week in which God created the world.'

skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5594…

From a letter of recommendation I read today:

'Having said this, I suppose it goes without saying that...'

#academicWriting

You're probably seen amazing videos of metronomes getting in sync (there are several movies on YouTube with millions of views). But surprisingly the math of how all this works is still up for grabs. Our latest article on this puzzle is freely available at doi.org/10.1063/5.0085…

John Dudley Steven Strogatz Together with Erik Andreas Martens we extended this experiment to two coupled populations — they can be in sync and go in phase, anti-phase or the counterintuitive broken symmetry state, with one in sync and the other desynchronised — a chimera

pnas.org/doi/full/10.10…

Nonlinear physics demo in my office, linked to a class on mode-locked lasers. It takes about 60 seconds to really lock, but once it's there, it stays there! For more about the wonder of synchronisation, read and follow Steven Strogatz

Me and my high school physics teacher at my PhD graduation

One cool thing about teaching this course on tiling theory is that I now see tiling patterns and frieze patterns everywhere I go. I hope I continue snapping photos of them in the future.

Here are photos from inside a beautiful hotel in Utica, a city in upstate NY. Its maximum

Here's a puzzler from my daughter's maths homework.

Human nutrition begins with milk, but this amazingly versatile biofluid does much more than feed babies. Join Cornell University molecular nutritionist Elizabeth Johnson and me for this Quanta Magazine podcast about immunity, the microbiome, and more. quantamagazine.org/what-does-milk…

Nonlinear model reduction to spectral submanifolds is now available even under general (e.g., chaotic) forcing. Asymptotic expansions for generalized
steady states of aperiodically forced mechanical systems also follow from these results.
doi.org/10.1063/5.0187…

Steven Strogatz Grant Sanderson Prof Steven. I watched the video and was completely blown away. No way I would have thought a cycloid would show up out of nowhere and how it got related to Snell's law. Totally cool !

Steven Strogatz Expanding a bit on my question above. Take a group of 4 of those terms and multiply by 1,0, -1, 0. Then add up successive groups of 4. And you get a periodic function, a sine or cosine, that has a period that is incommensurate with the 'period' of the group of 4. Seems odd.

This GeoGebra app by Walther Stuzka, a retired physics teacher at a high school in Vienna, Austria, lets you explore the famous brachistochrone problem (path of quickest descent):
geogebra.org/classic/jxesaf…

For background, see this Grant Sanderson video :
youtube.com/watch?v=Cld0p3…