Folding toilet paper thirteen times

James Tanton, of the St. Mark's Math Institute at St. Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts, makes excellent short mathematical videos.

He and his students also folded a very long piece of paper 13 times -- that is, they created 2¹³-ply toilet paper. This is a world record. (There's a bit of a question about whether they actually got 13 folds or just 12 -- the 13th fold has to be held in place. 12 has been done before.) You can read about it in a local newspaper, or see a video on Youtube. They did it in the "Infinite Corridor" of MIT, which is not infinite but is very long, about 800 feet. On a Sunday, apparently, and on what must be the third or fourth floor. They got access thanks to OrigaMIT, MIT's origami club. I am only very mildly surprised that such a club exists.

This whole thing may be the only known good use of single-ply toilet paper.

The Art of the Probable: Literature and Probability

From MIT's Open Course Ware: The Art of the Probable: Literature and Probability. The course readings include both some of the classical mathematical writings about probability (Pascal, Fermat, Leibnitz, Bernoulli, Bayes, Quetelet, etc.) as well as various more "literary" pieces.

Only at MIT...

(Seriously, though, I would have liked to take this class. And one of the readings from the last week is "the Bohr-Einstein dialogue", which you may know refers to whether God does or does not play dice.)

Bringing Down The House

From the MIT News Office: Film loosely based on MIT blackjack team opens Friday. (That's Friday, March 28.) The film is based on the book Bringing Down The House. I haven't seen it, and I probably won't, because it hasn't gotten the best reviews. Also, I generally tend to dislike movies that take place in fictionalized versions of places I know; they look all wrong. (A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting come to mind. Also, 10th and Wolf, which has nothing to do with math, but is set around the corner from where I was born in Philadelphia, and was filmed in Pittsburgh.)

Anyway, the press release says:

Most notably, the character played by Kevin Spacey, portrayed as an MIT professor, is entirely fictional. While his irresponsible acts may enliven the Hollywood script, they are entirely unrepresentative of the Institute.

I wonder if their legal department told them to say that. They also point out that real MIT students are good at math too! This is true.

Largest icosahedron ever?

Biggest icosahedron ever?

Some MIT students (I used to be one) built a 20-sided die in honor of Gary Gygax, the recently-dead inventor of Dungeons and Dragons.

Do you know of any physically larger icosahedron? (And, for that matter, how large is this one? I'm guessing maybe eight feet high, but I'm really just making that up. The building behind it is about four stories, but none of the other relevant distances are apparent.)

(Via Eric Berlin.)