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Steve Abbott
Bruce Torrence
Editors

February 2012: Table of Contents

Page 5—This Old House Needs a Mathematician
Edward Aboufadel
A trip to the paint store leads to a surprising encounter with "mixed" fractions.

Page 6 —Euclid Makes the Cut
Margaret Symington
Geometry finds its way into the operating room via a fascinating collaboration between a topologist and a dermatologic surgeon.

Page 10—Slicing Surfaces
Kim Abbott and Edward Early
Euler's seminal result from graph theory provides the key to tabulating the size of various partitions on a host of topological surfaces.

Page 13—A Dozen Proofs That 0=1
James Tanton
If one of these arguments turns out to be valid, then none of them are!

Page 17—Mathematical Poetry: A Lost Soliloquy—Found!
Paul Vetscher
The Prince of Denmark anguishes over a different, but equally vexing, conundrum.

Page 18—The Disgruntled Math Major: Math Humor is No Laughing Matter
Nick Boredaki
Our opinionated MH columnist is back with another installment of unfiltered student advice about the Putnam exam, power series, and the math profession’s poor sense of humor.

Page 20—Lost and Found: The Archimedes Palimpsest Comes to Light
Amy Shell-Gellasch
Dismantled, cut, scraped clean, overwritten, and then lost (twice), these 1,000-year-old pages still miraculously have a story to tell about antiquity’s greatest mathematician.

Page 22—An Algebraic Approach to Geometrical Optimization
Stan Wagon
The continuous tools from linear programming are brought to bear on the traveling salesman problem and other discrete variants—with cycle-smashing success.

Page 28—Radon-Kaczmarz Puzzles: CAT Scans Meet Sudoku
Julian F. Fleron
A new sudoku-type puzzle offers rich insight into the mathematics of medical imaging.

Page 30—THE PLAYGROUND!
The Math Horizons problem section, edited by Derek Smith

Aftermath:Unduly Noted (click to read and respond)
Tommy Ratliff
The way we notate trigonometric functions and their inverses is sinful.

 


Math Horizons Editors Past and Present: Former editors Steve Kennedy, Deanna Haunsperger, Art Benjamin, Jenny Quinn, and current editors Steve Abbott and Bruce Torrence together at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington, D.C.