Mathfest 2008, held in beautiful Madison, WI, has just finished up. As I am sitting in a coffeehouse on State Street, I would like to share some of the mathematical highlights.
- Erik Demaine, Hedrick Lecturer. Erik Demaine gave a phenomenal triple of talks about Folding, Algorithms, Art, Magic, Transformers, Reconfigurable Robots, and other equally cool stuff. A highlight for me was the discussion on Saturday of the recent proof that given any finite set of polygons, all having equal area, in the plane, there exists a hinged dissection of one of them that allows a hinged transformation to any of the others! Amazing. Another highlight was his discussion of modern technical origami; I have not paid too much attention to origami since I was in elementary school, but examples like this blew my mind completely. A wonderful synthesis of algorithms and art.
- The minicourse I took on the Geometry of Voting from Don Saari of UC – Irvine. I highly recommend for non-mathematicians and mathematicians alike his book Chaotic Elections. Hopefully in the future I will be able to post some more thoughts about the mathematics behind elections and voting.
