Under the category of “Somebody Had To Figure It Out,” Dr. Andrew Simoson of King University (Bristol, Tennessee) used calculus to determine the shape of the island of Utopia in the 500-year-old book by Sir Thomas More based on the description of island given in the book’s introduction.
News article: https://www.insidescience.org/news/math-maps-island-thomas-mores-utopia
Paper by Dr. Simoson: http://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2016/bridges2016-65.html
From the excellent article “This Is Why There Are So Many Ties In Swimming“, ties in swimming are allowed by the sport’s governing body because of the inevitability of roundoff error.
In 1972, Sweden’s Gunnar Larsson beat American Tim McKee in the 400m individual medley by 0.002 seconds. That finish led the governing body to eliminate timing by a significant digit. But why?
In a 50 meter Olympic pool, at the current men’s world record 50m pace, a thousandth-of-a-second constitutes 2.39 millimeters of travel. FINA pool dimension regulations allow a tolerance of 3 centimeters in each lane, more than ten times that amount. Could you time swimmers to a thousandth-of-a-second? Sure, but you couldn’t guarantee the winning swimmer didn’t have a thousandth-of-a-second-shorter course to swim. (Attempting to construct a concrete pool to any tighter a tolerance is nearly impossible; the effective length of a pool can change depending on the ambient temperature, the water temperature, and even whether or not there are people in the pool itself.)
From Math With Bad Drawings:
Additionally, my favorites from the comments:
Evariste Galois gets an A+ in math and gets a D in behavior. Evariste is a very creative mathematician with potential for greatness. But he needs to get along better with others. Getting into fights is not the way to succeed.
Gödel is excellent at logic but his work is often incomplete.
I am missing Heisenberg’s report card here. “Werner refuses to give an exact answer and seems to be proud of his uncertainty.”
Benoit Mandelbrot C+, great at drawing designs but keeps going on and on and on about perimeters. Next time he should work on calculating areas as his answers were always zero…
I’m doing something that I should have done a long time ago: collecting a series of posts into one single post. The following links comprised my series poorly written word problem, taken directly from textbooks and other materials from textbook publishers.
Part 1: Addition and estimation.
Part 2: Estimation and rounding.
Part 3: Probability.
Part 4: Subtraction and estimation.
Part 5: Algebra and inequality.
Part 6: Domain and range of a function.
Part 7: Algebra and inequality.
Part 8: Algebra and inequality.
Part 9: Geometric series.
I’m doing something that I should have done a long time ago: collecting a series of posts into one single post. The following links comprised my series on using examples from popular culture to illustrate principles of predicate logic. My experiences teaching these ideas to my discrete mathematics students led to my recent publication (John Quintanilla, “Name That Tune: Teaching Predicate Logic with Popular Culture,” MAA Focus, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 27-28, August/September 2016).
Unlike other series that I’ve made, this series didn’t have a natural chronological order. So I’ll list these by concept illustrated from popular logic.
Logical and 
Logical or 
Logical negation 
Logical implication 
For all 
For all and implication:
There exists 
Existence and uniqueness:
DeMorgan’s Laws:
Simple nested predicates:
Maximum or minimum of a function:
Somewhat complicated examples:
Fairly complicated examples:
Really complicated examples:
For more on Abbott and Costello and mathematics, here’s the classic routine “Two Tens for a Five.” (On my first job as a teenager, my boss successfully pulled this joke on me using two dimes and a nickel.)
Mean Green Math 