Perhaps the more impressive number is that they found 7 quintillion new irregular pentagons that can't tile the plane.
Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
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Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#22"Attack on the pentagon" ...aaaand the guardian has lowered themselves to buzzfeed's standards.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#23"That same year an unlikely mathematical pioneer entered the fray: Marjorie Rice, a San Diego housewife in her 50s, who had read about James’ discovery in Scientific American. An amateur mathematician, Rice developed her own notation and method and over the next few years discovered another four types of pentagon that tile the plane. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Rice
that's awesome. Outsider math and outsider art deserve as much respect as "outsider" programming ( startups / garage hackers ) garner. Creating semi-closed communities of insiders, united by what are essentially arcane handshakes, and dismissive of value emerging outside of themselves, is really just both a narrow-mindedness that doesn't behoove innovation and also an admission of an unnecessary insecurity about the lack of substantive reasons for cohesiveness in that community resulting in the desire to fabricate arbitrary insubstantial reasons for cohesiveness.
At the same time, you could say that narrow-mindedness was focus and restraint, things which __do__ work for innovation.
Another way of looking at the cohesiveness issue, is that if your community is so substantially strong, why do you need to exclude outsiders ? The best democracies include difference, revealing their strength through diversity. The worst extremist fascist states put it to death, revealing their dread of diversity.
Let the ad-hoc groups of intellectual collaborators be like democratic meritocracies not frightened facist states.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#24Perhaps the more impressive number is that they found 7 quintillion new irregular pentagons that can't tile the plane.
I've read your comment a few different ways. I'm concluding that you find it impressive that it took 7 quintillion tries to find a new pentagon that can tile the plane.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#25This is cool, but I'm not sure why it's a hard problem to solve for a computer running through a ton of 5-sided polygons with some basic rules and attempting to tessellate them? Is there a reason that approach doesn't work, other than being rather un-romantic as far as discovering cool new things like this goes?
Just going to leave this here https://xkcd.com/793/
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#26Meta question: where can I find list of simple unsolved/undiscovered problems like these in math?
It does not appear in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#27[deleted]
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#28Meta question: where can I find list of simple unsolved/undiscovered problems like these in math? It does not appear in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...
I don't think that tiling a plane is exactly a "simple" problem.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#29Meta question: where can I find list of simple unsolved/undiscovered problems like these in math? It does not appear in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_m...
I don't think that tiling a plane is exactly a "simple" problem.
I mean something simple enough to understand, and could be played by average programmer in a IPython Notebook.
I didn't mean simple to solve, just lower barrier of entry.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#30Kudos for not using the same clickbait title The Guardian did. Journalistic integrity is dead.
It's a pun, not clickbait. This is not the death of "journalistic integrity".
No, the original title is clearly clickbait – meant to be misinterpreted as something other than what the article is about. Here is what a real pun in a newspaper headline looks like: