Drawing a Chair 64 Times — Erich Dieckmann's 1931 morphological matrix — 8 rows, 64 variations, from rigid geometry to near-abstraction.
Design · BauhausFor curious minds
The good side of the internet.
Long reads on mathematics, science, and corners of the web that still feel human — picked slowly, written by Ali with a light touch, and meant to stick with you after you close the tab.
The Best Math Movies: Lives Written on the Board — A Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting, Pi, The Imitation Game — twenty-three films where the mathematics is never really about the numbers.
Film
The Equations That Forgot They Were Equations — Alejandro Guijarro photographed quantum mechanics blackboards at Cambridge, Oxford, CERN, and Stanford. No staging. Just what the physicists left behind.
Photography · Science
Five Math Movies That Actually Happened — A Beautiful Mind, Hidden Figures, Moneyball — five films where the mathematics is the plot, each adapted from a real life.
Film
23 Mathematics Books Dedicated to a Single Problem — Riemann, Fermat, Poincaré, Goldbach — twenty-three books that each orbit one problem, one question, one number.
Book list
Rafael Araujo's 20+ Mesmerizing Geometrical Masterpieces — Rafael Araujo spends 100 hours on a single drawing — no software, no undo. A selection of his most stunning hand-drawn golden ratio illustrations.
Mathematics · ArtGood Internet. Just Curated.
Long reads and sharp essays — science, math, and the web worth your attention.
The Möbius Strip: That a One-Sided Thing Should Be PossibleA half twist turns a two-sided loop into a one-sided object — from Möbius and Listing in 1858 to the recycling symbol in your pocket.
Conquest of Space: The 1963 Polish Space StampsIn the middle of the Cold War, the Polish post gathered the spacecraft of the first six years onto a single sheet, drawn in thin lines.
Five Math Movies That Actually HappenedA Beautiful Mind, Stand and Deliver, Hidden Figures, Moneyball, X+Y — five films where the mathematics is not decoration but the reason the movie exists, each adapted from a documented real life.
The Best Math Movies: Lives Written on the BoardA Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting, Pi, Proof, The Imitation Game, Hidden Figures — twenty-three films where the mathematics is never really about the numbers, but about the people wrestling with them.
The Ghost Who Solved a TheoremNinety-four days after his friend died, Robert Thomason dreamed the idea that cracked a fifteen-year problem in algebraic K-theory — and listed the dead man as coauthor.
Why Do Fireflies Flash in Unison?Every May, the forests of Tennessee pulse with yellow-green light for two weeks. Tens of thousands of Photinus carolinus fireflies synchronize their flashes without any conductor — pure mathematics in action.
Mathematics · Nature
The Two Whales That Drew a Fibonacci Spiral
A drone caught two humpback whales tracing a spiral of bubbles off Antarctica. Everyone called it Fibonacci — but what curve did they actually draw?
Video · Kinetic Art
Asobi — Newton's Cradle, Reinvented with Light
Eleven incandescent bulbs, two hidden pistons, one law from 1687. Yasutoki Kariya's senior thesis turned Newton's Cradle into a chain of light.
Video · Design · Art
Real Time: Sweeper's Clock
Two men spend twelve hours pushing debris around an empty floor. The result is a working clock, and a precise argument about labor and time.
Mathematics · Television
Mr. Finch Explains Pi to a Classroom
Harold Finch steps to a chalkboard in Person of Interest S02E11 and delivers one of the most moving speeches about mathematics ever written for American television.
Book · Kinetic Design
The Page That Moves Without Power
Two layers of printed lines. One transparent film. No battery, no code — slide it across the page and the geometry comes alive. Takahiro Kurashima's Poemotion, 2011.
Data · Visualization
Kung Fu Motion Visualization
Tobias Gremmler turned motion-capture data from Kung Fu masters into five moving sculptures. Veri heykel oldu; zaman kumaş, hız madde.
Film · Mathematics
Good Will Hunting
A janitor at MIT solves a research-level math problem in chalk on a hallway wall. The film is entirely uninterested in the mathematics.
Film · Animation
Here We Are
Oliver Jeffers began the book the night his son was born. Apple TV+ turned it into a 36-minute animated short narrated by Meryl Streep.
Documentary
A tree on a barge, crossing the Black Sea
Salomé Jashi's documentary on a billionaire who collected ancient trees — uprooted, shipped, replanted.
Film · Movie
Rushmore
Max Fischer is failing every class. He is also the founder of eleven clubs. Wes Anderson's best argument that how you spend your attention is who you are.
Small wonders. Big clicks.
Curated gadgets from the web — clever, useful, and a little fun, handpicked for your attention.
100% read
Helicone: A Pine Cone in Your Palm — A kinetic sculpture that appears when a scientist turns the spiral arrangement of a pine cone into numbers.
100% read
The Mandelmap Poster — Bill Tavis spent over a year turning the Mandelbrot set into a seventeenth-century sea chart — compass rose, sea monsters, and named valleys you can actually sail to. A vintage map of infinite complexity.
100% read
Author Clock — A desk clock that tells time through literary quotes. E-paper display, white oak housing, brass base. It raised nearly a million dollars on Kickstarter and is sold at MoMA.
100% read
Bambu Lab P2S — Platonic solids, Fibonacci spirals, bridge load tests. The printer that makes abstract math something a child can hold.
100% read
Martin's Chocolatier Chocolate Planets — Nine handmade Belgian truffles. Eight planets plus the Sun. Zero Pluto.
100% read
xTool F1 Ultra — Two lasers, one desk. Fiber for metal, diode for wood — both at research-grade precision.
100% read
Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk — A Stanford professor cleared Amazon overnight. It was just chalk. Or was it?
Reading list
Long reads, bound.
Math, science, and voices that reward slow pages — the shelf we steal from between essays.
A Self-Learner's Roadmap Through 30+ Great Math Books
Book list · Abakcus
Not a pile of recommendations. A path — thirty books in five stages for the self-taught reader.
23 Mathematics Books Dedicated to a Single Problem
Book list · Abakcus
Riemann, Fermat, Poincaré, Goldbach — twenty-three books that each orbit one problem, one question, one number.
14 Mathematics Books Written by Artists, Architects, and Writers
Book list · Abakcus
Dürer, Xenakis, Le Corbusier, Borges — fourteen mathematics books born from necessity, not from a department.
Five Books That Teach You to Think Like a Mathematician
Reading list · Abakcus
Mathematical thinking is a skill, not a talent. Five books on proof and logic that teach you how.
Six Books That Taught π How to Misbehave
Book list
History, obsession, category theory, a novella — and a knight named Sir Cumference.
Werner's Nomenclature of Colours
Patrick Syme
Before colour photography, how did a scientist describe a colour to someone else? 108 hand-painted tones, each tied to a stone, a bird, and a flower.
Life's Devices
Steven Vogel
No creature ever escaped gravity, water, or air. The classic of biomechanics that reads the living world as a structure under load.
99 Variations on a Proof
Philip Ording
One unremarkable cubic equation, proved ninety-nine different ways. Mathematics is not a logic machine — it is a matter of style.
Sorular
Questions worth a pause.
Tiny puzzles and gentle brain-twists — each one fits in a coffee break. No grades; just the fun of figuring it out.
Tools worth the tab.
Handpicked apps, sites, and extensions from the open web — useful, odd, and worth bookmarking.
View all tools
The Map of Mathematics — Quanta Magazine mapped the living frontier of mathematical research — 41 nodes, four territories, every connection a link to original reporting.
Pattern Radio: Whale Songs — Google AI and NOAA opened 8,000 hours of underwater recordings to anyone with a browser. Scroll through a year of ocean. Find the whales.
Save Everything. Organize Nothing. — mymind auto-tags every link, image, and note you save — then finds them when you search. No folders. No system. Just save.
Every Raindrop Has a Destination — Click anywhere in the world and watch where water goes — from hilltop to ocean
12,795 Objects, One Life — Barbara Iweins photographed everything she owns. The spreadsheet knows things she didn't.
299 Products. One Graveyard. — Google has retired 299 products since 2006. The pattern is not random.
Statistics You Can Watch Think — A Brown University student made probability visible — and changed how a generation understands statistics.
Your Favorite Fry Is a Geometry Problem — A 3D scrollytelling tool that walks through every major fry shape and explains exactly why you prefer it. The answer is a surface-to-volume ratio.
The Color the Forest Already Had — 825 colors, 40+ dye mushrooms. Julie Beeler’s atlas of natural color that exists only because a specific fungus grew in a specific place.
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