math them

I've been making tensegrity polyhedra for about a decade now and have never taken the time to write about them for a general audience, so thought this might be a good time to do so. As with my post on modular origami with Sonobe units , we'll be looking at a single unit along with some mathematical insights that lead to a variety of structures.

The artwork of M. C. Escher often incorporated mathematical motifs. Today we'll look at a fun way to make exciting tilings from conventional ones.

Serpentiles allow the creation of richly patterned or random-seeming mosaics from relatively small tilesets. Here we'll take a look at a couple games that make use of a simple set and their colored variant.

Today we'll look at some reconfigurations of the 2x2x2 Rubik's cube that allow for different explorations and lower the floor.

When I was a grad student, I used to keep a basket of burr puzzles on my coffee table for guests to fiddle with. Today we'll look at an activity where students design them before solving them!

I first encountered the locker problem at a math competition in high school. JRMF used to have a version of it on the books called Lightbulbs , but it was retired because it was too app-dependent. Today we'll look at some manipulatives and sequences for a hands-on, in-person version.

I first encountered Numberlink puzzles in the (numberless) Flow Free app and appreciated them because they were a little more topological than the typical logic puzzle.

There are a number of interesting ways to make a two-player game out of coloring the vertices of graphs. We'll look at a couple.

Daniel Kline has been playing around with an in-person version of Panning for Gold and was wondering what other puzzle variants could be done on a balance scale. This post is an attempt to answer that question!

Here we'll look at some of the mathematics behind a cheap, commercially available peg solitaire puzzle.