Okapis and ongoing notes on two new decks
My favorite animal of all the animals has to be the earthworm. It’s so accurately named. Although I don’t know any worms from any other planet. Let’s all be proud of the earthworm, representing the whole planet. All the other animals are quite unclear about the home planet. With the earthworm we know immediately. It’s a local animal, from this planet.
— Ismo
My favorite animal is the okapi. It has a head like a giraffe, markings like a zebra, and is found in the forests of the Congo. October 18th is World Okapi Day and I had to pay homage to the okapi the only way I know how — with a math question.
What’s the weird dimension? I was reading The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (I wrote a blog post about that book) and found an entry that called the fourth dimension “the weird dimension” with respect to the Poincaré conjecture.
I loved it. I even emailed the Harvard mathematician that wrote the line.
I was hoping Henri Poincaré’s birthday was in October. (It’s not.) Then I was hoping Grigori Perelman’s birthday was in October. (It’s not.) While running this errand I found three mathematicians whose birthdays are in October: George Boole, Alfred North Whitehead, and Évariste Galois.
Ongoing notes on two new decks
I have been wanting to do a geometry deck from the beginning. I’m keeping the theme of food and calling this one crème brûlée. Here’s a very tentative mockup:
I thought it would be a nice to match the color of the spine to the math word on the card — this way if cards from different decks get shuffled, you can easily put them back. I also added a little decorative flourish to the top since crème brûlée reminds me of fancy things like Paris and jazz. I mean geometry!
The blue and deep red reference the strawberries and blueberries that are sometimes served on top.
I have no design background and am doing this all myself, so really — please write to me if you think it stinks! sheilap@alumni.cmu.edu
I am an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon, a giant nerd-hub epicenter of computer science. For that reason, I wanted the spine of the AI/computer science deck to feature Carnegie Red. Andrew Carnegie was Scottish — and CMU’s mascot is the Scottish terrier — so I named this one after a Scottish dessert. I also like that the dessert begins with “C” and is red and white!
I added a transparent node and line thing in the background
The Koblitz curve is a special type of elliptic curve used elliptic curve cryptography. All this and more (like byte and node and data structure) will be on this new deck, along with another 100-odd sources and a card that says “Hello, World!” probably. I’m excited to write and draw it!