A Very Merry UnBirthday!

My 28th birthday came and went last month. Despite my lack of chatter about it here, it was pretty well spent. I recieved some wonderful gifts, impecably chosen for me. My favorite new toy is my Speedball Screenprinting kit gifted to me by the Mister. Ah, he knows me so well! I’d been wanting to try screenprinting for a very long time and had experimented with some diy methods, but was never able to get the results that I had hoped for.

The kit comes with two basic methods for creating the screen. The first is the screen-filler method. You paint a plasticizing chemical onto all of the areas where you do not want the ink to transfer through the screen to the material. This is the simplest, easiest, quickest method to prepare your screen, but the second is much more fun. The second method is called photo-emulsion. With this method, you coat the screen with a light-sensitive chemical, then you place a graphic that has been printed or drawn onto acetate or tracing paper between the screen and a light source. All of the places where the light reaches the chemical on the screen (i.e. all of the places that aren’t blocked by the graphic) harden and become plasticky, the rest of the areas (the graphic) are washed out so that the ink penetrates the screen.

Okay, that’s a rushed and super-simplified explanation of the screen printing process. If anybody cares, I can do a more detailed post in the future, but there are already some great resources out there for those of you who are interested in doing this yourself, in particular this MAKE and this Threadbanger video.

All of that was just so that I could show off my first semi-success:

This is my Set of Numbers Matrioshki print. It’s a math joke. Let me explain: The font was a little bit too fine to print well, but you can sort of make it out. The smallest matrioshka is N, the set of natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3…). The second smallest is Z, the integers (-1, 0, 1, 2…). Maybe you remember from math class that all natural numbers are integers. We say that the set Z contains the set N. Do you see the joke now? As we move further to the right we have the quotients, which contains the integers, the reals contain the quotients, and finally the complex numbers contain the reals. It’s nerdy, I know.

This image has been floating around in my head for years and I’m so excited to see it finally come to life. Even though the screen isn’t perfect, I think I’m going to make myself a t-shirt. I don’t think that I have the patience to try the same graphic twice. There are too many things to make and only so much time!

 

Infinitely Dense

One of my favorite diversions is Brown Sharpie, a webcomic full of math-wit drawn by Courtney Gibbons with, you guessed it, a brown sharpie*. Three times a week, I find myself thinking, “Now that would make a great embroidery to nerdify my home.” (Yes, nerdifying my home is a goal of mine.) Yesterday, I finally set out to make one of these embroideries. I chose this Bananananana… Bread comic from February, because isn’t that perfect for a tea towel?

Unfortunately, I had a difficult time transferring the image to this natural linen, despite using the sunniest window in the house as a light-source. I ended up freehanding the text and the result is… well, you can see how bad that text looks. Rather than ripping it out, I’m just going to get some white linen and re-do the whole thing. Maybe I’ll do this one next.

Thanks, Courtney, for giving me permission to copy your work and share it here!

* Well, it’s now a brown-sharpie-like tool in whichever drawing program she uses with her pen-tablet.

 

There are no uninteresting numbers

1. (one, один, aon, un, hvmken, א) The unit, multiplicative identity, and automorphic in any positional number system. 1 = G-d. Also, 1 = 0.99999… The Messier object, M1, is a remnant supernova in the constellation Taurus.
2. (two, два, dhá, deux, hokkolen, ב) The oddest prime. the first Sophie Germain prime. A Pell number and highly composite. The first letter in the Torah is bet.
3. (three, trois, tuccenen, ג )* A Marsenne Prime and the only prime which is one shy a perfect square. An integer is divisible by three if the sum of its digits is divisible by three. 3 is the base of the ternary system.
4. (four, quatre, osten, ד ) The smallest composite number. The smallest noncyclic group has four elements, the Klein fou-group, which is also the name of a cool math band. Every natural number divisible by four is the difference of two squares. There are four matriarchs of Judaism, Sarah, Rebeccah, Leah, and Rachel.
5. (five, cinq, cahkepen, ה) A Fermat Prime. No polynomial equation of degree 5 or greater can be solved using a simple formula. The symmetric group, S₅, is not solvable. There are five Platonic solids. The Torah cnsists of 5 books.
6. (six, six, epaken, ו ) The only number which is both perfect and triangular (which happens to be the result of my first theorem). Shavuot begins on the sixth day of Sivan.
7. (seven, sept, kolvpaken, ז) A happy number. There are seven frieze groups. A group of seven objects is a heptad.
8. (eight, huit, cenvpaken, ח) A byte is a grouping of eight bits. A Jewish boy undergoes his brit milah on his eighth day.
9. (nine, neuf, ostvpaken, ט)The first composite lucky number.The only square prime whose aliquot parts also sum up to a square prime. Nine is an exponential factorial, that is, 9 =3²¹ .
10. (ten, dix, palen, י ) The base of our standard numeral system. Ten is bi. A bi-prime, that is, because it is the product of two primes. There ten plagues, ten days of repentance, and ten generations between Adam and Noah.
11. (eleven, onze*) To determine if a number is divisible by 11, take the sum of pairs of digits. For example consider 71104. 7 + 11 + 04 = 22, which is 2*11, so 71104 is also divisible by 11.
12. (twelve, douze) A superfactorial. Twelve is the answer to the three dimensional Kissing Sphere problem (thus, there are twelve green spheres in my userpic). Twelve is sublime. Jewish girls come of age at 12.
13. (thirteen, treize) there are thirteen Archimedian solids. A Jewish boy comes of age at 13,
14. (fourteen, quatorze) Discretely bi (prime).
15. (fifteen, quinze) The smallest number that can be factored using Shor’s quantum algorithm.
16. (sixteen, seize) the only number of the form x^y=y^x with x and y different integers.
17. 17 is the number of wallpaper groups.
18. the only number that is twice the sum of its digits
19. 19 is the maximum number of 4th powers needed to sum to any number.
20. the number of rooted trees with 6 vertices.
21. 21 is the smallest number of distinct squares needed to tile a square.
22. 22 is the number of partitions of 8.
23. 23 is the smallest number of integer-sided boxes that tile a box so that no two boxes share a common length.
24. 24 is the largest number divisible by all numbers less than its square root.
25. 25 is the smallest square that can be written as a sum of 2 squares.
26. 26 is the only number to be directly between a square and a cube.

Most of this is from wikipedia, though at 17 I got impatient and copy/pasted from here

* I either can no longer count in the given language/s or am being lazy about switching to the Hebrew or Russian keyboards. By the by, the languages are: english, russian, irish, french, creek, and hebrew.

The moral of the story is that I’m old today.