Notices by Oscar Cunningham (oscarcunningham@mathstodon.xyz)

It looks like the ⍼ saga has finally ended!

The unicode character '⍼' was a mystery first noticed in 2022: https://ionathan.ch/2022/04/09/angzarr.html. It's in the Unicode standard as a mathematical symbol. But no one could find any examples of it having been used, and no one knew what it represented. It was like the only record of an extinct species, fossilized in the Unicode standard.

But now someone has found the document it originally came from! It represents the angle 'Azimuth', and the symbol probably comes from the path light takes through a sextant. https://ionathan.ch/2026/02/16/angzarr.html

(@johncarlosbaez might appreciate this symbol!)

@dneary @evan Would '1m' be accepted, or did it have to be '1.0m'?

A working QR code in the style of Piet Mondrian. Inspired @divbyzero and @andrewt.

#Art #PietMondrian #QRCode

'poly-' means many
'-est' means most
'-er' means more

'polyester' lots and lots and lots and lots

@julesh You just take the sum of the surface areas of the convex hulls of the presents, and then slice that much paper + ε into tiny squares. Then you can reassemble the squares into whatever shapes you need.

There's no constraint on the amount of tape you can use, so of course the mathematician's answer uses a huge amount of it.

@4raylee @ColinTheMathmo 44.052 Doesn't round to 44.0 even if you're rounding to even.

@ColinTheMathmo @4raylee In the contexts I've seen 'rounding to even' used, it's meant rounding *halves* to even as a tiebreak. Other numbers still get rounded normally.

@johncarlosbaez It would be an interesting gimmick to have a piece played by two groups of musicians some distance apart, where he audience is instructed to walk slowly from one group to the other.

The two parts would slowly go out and back into phase with each other. There would also be interesting effects on the timbre from one group being quiet and near while the other is louder and further away.