How to eat Candy Buttons like a Recreational Mathemusician
[permalink]
Another video!
This one is done YouTube-style, but I'll get the non-YouTube one up along with a page in the candy section of the mathematical food page sometime in the future.
You can also now 'like' my new facebook page, if you like.
— posted
Wednesday, December 08, 2010 at 01:46AM EST
New Page: Candy Corn Sierpinski's Triangle
[permalink]
I wanted to do something mathematical with candy corn, seeing as they're such an iconic Halloween candy (and you know how I feel about Halloween) in such an iconic shape (and you know how I feel about shapes). They make a very nice Sierpinski's Triangle:
I built this starting from the top with one piece, and following the simple rule that for each layer, put a new piece below the spots where there is exactly one candy corn bottom corner. The process is explained with diagrams in a new page on candy corn.
When I was shopping for a pumpkin to carve into a dodecahedron, I came across a big bag of lollipops that boasted 12 different flavours. Continuing the spirit of Halloween-inspired math, there was really only one obvious way to proceed from there:
There are 60 lollipops arranged with icosahedral symmetry, five each of 12 flavours. The first photo shows the whole ball, looking down at one of the 3-fold axes. The bulkiness of the wrappers makes it difficult to see the structure from the outside, but an inside view centered on one of the 5-fold axes reveals that the sticks are carefully arranged.
Each of the twelve pentagons has one of the twelve flavours circling it. I still have a bunch of extra lollipops, so there may be some more lollipolyhedra in the future... but there's so much other Halloween candy to mathematically explore as well!
![[Vi Hart logo]](/images/butterfly_small.png)
