Jos Leys is an expert user and programmer of the fractal imaging software Ultra Fractal. If you like circles and radial symmetry as much as I do, you will love his mathematical image gallery, which is filled with all kinds of circular goodness.

Wheel Music is another music visualization, using similar techniques to those I used in my Whitney Music Box. Each dot in the animation represents an individual note you are hearing. The notes are slowly traveling around in a circle. Each square represents a different tone cluster, or chord. Colors represent note values, and the radius […]

Krazydad Irregular Ryan Govostes writes: Hey Jim, I noticed a neat phenomenon while making myself a bowl of nutritious EasyMac (the fake microwaveable macaroni-and-powdered-cheese product from Kraft). The first step is to pour the noodles into a bowl and add a bit of water, then microwave for a few minutes. Now, obviously, when you put […]

One of my favorite composers, Gyorgy Ligeti, died this morning at the age of 83. Time for a little Lux Aeterna.

What are Tag Clouds, you ask? Here’s a sample. I’ve provided some tips for building Tag Clouds at O’Reilly’s ONLamp website. This is an excerpt from my longer article, Building Tag Clouds with Perl and PHP.

Registration is now open for the Google US Puzzle Championship, organized by Nick Baxter and Will Shortz. Players have 2 1/2 hours to complete 25 fiendishly difficult puzzles.

I’m currently working on a series of mosaics using landscape and animal photos. Here’s a sample. UPDATE: I received a letter about this image. Here it is. I love the work that you do, and I have a question about what an algorithm is. Is it math that you can Javascript, taken from an abstraction […]

Petals around the Rose is a puzzle in which you must figure out an underlying system based on the roll of 5 dice. It took me about an hour to figure it out. Some people get it right away, others take months. Here are two versions. Chris Davis’s version (flash) Lloyd Borrett’s version (javascript)

While on a morning coffee run with a coworker, we chanced on the subject of religious experience, and I mentioned that exploring mathematics is the closest I’ve come to a religious epiphany. Although this notion is probably familiar to folks versed in the physical sciences, my friend was surprised to hear it. I brought up […]