Mathematics Carnival 51

Welcome to the 51st Carnival of Mathematics.

After a not-so-short hiatus (6 weeks ofnugg deadly silence), I'm happy to present Math Carnival #51, aka "The Resurrection Carnival".

Random bits of trivia about 51 throughout history:

• The year 51 (AD, or CE) in the Julian calendar shared one thing in common with today's Carnival — it's start date was a Friday.
• In the Gregorian calendar, 1751 also started on a Friday.
• Euler published his theory of logarithms of complex numbers in 1751.
• There is no truth to the rumor that this carnival disappeared for some time because the coordinator, Alon Levy, got lost in Area 51.

On with the show.

Human bodies

John Cook inspires us to consider some math behind elephants and mice in Metabolism and power laws. When not blogging, John works in a cancer clinic.
Blog home: The Endeavour.

Calculus

In Aspects Of A Topic, Vlorbik on Math Ed argues the case for considering the formula for the length of a curve parametrically, rather than the normal asymmetric definition .
Blog home: Community College Calculus.

Beginnings and Endings

Benford's Law — One is NOT the Loneliest Number has Pat Ballew pointing out that the first cardinal number is surprisingly common when describing quantities.
Blog home: Pat'sBlog.

Inspired by Benford's Law and Pat's article, I did a quick google to see how many search results appeared for various numbers, and came up with:
1: 21,580,000,000
2: 19,990,000,000
3: 15,990,000,000
4: 12,780,000,000

Indeed, the number of results decreases until 9, but there is an upset for 10:
9: 8,200,000,000
10: 12,840,000,000

And at the other end of the number line, Barry Leiba in Infinity plus one discusses large numbers of hotel guests.
Blog home: Staring At Empty Pages.

Massively Collaborative Mathematics

Jason Dyer gives a "simple as possible" overview of Timothy Gowers' initiatives in A gentle introduction to the Polymath project. The post gives the background to the density Hales-Jewett problem. The line that caught my eye was from Gowers: "Is massively collaborative mathematics possible?".
Blog home: The Number Warrior.

Ball Stacking

An interesting coincidence occurred with the following 2 posts. Both talk about stacking spheres in square pyramids, but in quite different contexts.

TwoPi offers us Pascal’s Pyramid (part 1 of 3), where he ponders the nature of a three dimensional analogue of the Pascal Triangle.
Blog home: 360.

Mike Croucher challenges the reader to find the volume of a square pyramid that completely surrounds a stack of cannon balls in Problem of the week #6 - Cannonballs.
Blog home: Walking Randomly.

Amicable Numbers

In an unusual post, Paul Dyson shows us what would happen when The Numbers go Social Networking. The links point to nice summaries of the different number types.

Free Math Downloads

My contribution to this Math Carnival is the post Free math software downloads, which may come in handy in these tight economic times.

Future of the Math Carnival

I'm not sure where the Carnival goes from here. There seems to have been a slide in interest in recent months.

My proposal: Why not draw up a schedule so that we host once every (say) 4 months? Would that work, do you think?

That concludes this edition. Goodnight and good luck.

See the 12 Comments below.