an invitation, not a textbook

Math is
Beautiful

You were never bad at math. You were just never shown its face. Six exhibits below. Touch everything.

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The Exhibits

drag
φ

The Golden Spiral

Grow the curve that lives in shells, storms and galaxies.

roll
π

The Circle, Unrolled

Every circle in the universe hides the same secret.

reveal

The Primes Whisper

Chaos, until you spiral it. Then patterns nobody can explain.

draw

Draw, Math Draws Back

Sketch anything. Spinning circles will redraw it perfectly.

story
1729

Ramanujan's Taxicab

The most famous small talk in the history of mathematics.

design

Drawn by Equations

A design gallery where every artist is a formula.

Exhibit 01 · φ

The Golden Spiral

Take a rectangle. Cut away a perfect square. What remains is the same rectangle, smaller. Do it forever, and a spiral is born. Nature discovered this before we did.

φ = 1.6180339…

Begin. One square at a time.

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Exhibit 02 · π

The Circle, Unrolled

Roll a circle along a line and its edge lays out exactly π diameters. Always, everywhere, at every size. Then watch its infinite digits become a walk that never repeats.

0.00 diameters

Push the wheel. Count the diameters.

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Exhibit 03 · ℙ

The Primes Whisper

In 1963 a bored mathematician doodled numbers in a spiral during a lecture. When he circled the primes, diagonal lines appeared out of nowhere. Nobody fully knows why.

n = 1

Spiral outward from 1. Light up the primes.

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Exhibit 04 · ∿

Draw, and Math Draws Back

Sketch anything in one stroke. A star, your initial, a cat. Then watch a chain of spinning circles, doing nothing but going round and round, redraw it perfectly. Joseph Fourier discovered this in 1807 and mathematicians called him crazy.

draw here with your finger or mouse
one continuous stroke works best
60 circles

Every drawing, no matter how wild, is secretly a sum of perfect circles.

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Exhibit 05 · london, 1918, a hospital room
1729

"I rode here in taxicab number 1729. Rather a dull number, I thought."

"No, Hardy. It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."

g.h. hardy visits srinivasa ramanujan · answered from his sickbed, instantly

+ 12³
+ 10³

Now you try. Find another one.

Test any number. Sum of two cubes at all? Once? Twice?

Hint: your birth year probably fails. That is exactly why 1729 is special.

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Nobody is afraid of a sunflower.

Math was never the enemy. The way it was shown to you was.