Baking



These shortbread cookies are 3x3 Latin and Euler squares, using different levels of chocolate to achieve the various colors (joint baking with Beth-Anne Castellano and Matthew Ellison). They were distributed alongside a Graduate Student Seminar I gave about this topic.


The below pies are inspired by Lauren Ko, author of Piometry, whose book was helpful in making these. They are joint work with Elizabeth Buchanan, Beth-Anne Castellano, and Alex Wilson. Each represents a different mathematical concept.

The pie to the right is a random tiling of the "Aztec diamond" by dominos, color coded by their orientation. One of the artic circle theorems says that a randomly selected tiling will have a circle of randomness, surrounded by "frozen" sections at the corners, where all pieces have the same orientation.





This pie one of the pentagonal tilings discovered by Marjorie Rice, an amateur mathematician that made a massive contribution to a longstanding problem about the possible tilings by irregular pentagons. It reminds us that everyone can have great ideas, and that math is something for everyone.







On the left, the pie is the aperiodic monotile discovered by Smith, Myers, Kaplan, and Goodman-Strauss. This tile solves the "Einstein" problem, namely it is a single tile that can only cover the plane without any symmetries, which had been a longstanding question that ended up admitting a unexpectedly simple solution. This too was solved by an amateur mathematician.