Heptadecagon

To wrap up a little unfinished business, here are some photographs from the heart dissection. There was no squeamishness from Z&T about touching the heart, putting their fingers inside the chambers, and even about cutting parts of it open by themselves. On the contrary, they were almost as excited about this as Chris was. But they did ask if the cow from which the heart came was still alive.

This happened around Halloween 2007. The recounting below is from an email message I sent to a few friends. Warning: this is what happens when you marry a physiologist. I've pieced together the dialogue as best as I recall. As many of you know, Chris teaches anatomy and physiology part-time at the Community College. On Wednesday night, she came home from class with a large paper bag from Dorothy Lane Market --- sort of the equivalent of Merchant of Vino, for the Ann Arborites in the audience --- and was abundantly excited about the contents of the bag. She told me to guess what she had. I was thinking brownies, cake, or cookies. Maybe sushi. Hopefully something with chocolate. Chris reached inside the paper bag, and pulled out a large zip-lock plastic bag containing something about the size and shape of a football, except that it had blood vessels transversing its surface, and one region near the bottom was covered in yellow fatty tissue. You didn't have to be a bi...

So, we were supposed to go to Michigan last weekend for our niece's first birthday. On Tuesday evening, Zoe came down with a case of the pukes. The all-night long pukes. We kept her home from school on Wednesday, but sent Talia, and told Chris's family that as long as everyone else stayed healthy, we'd see them on Saturday. Zoe seemed fine by Wednesday evening, so she went back to school on Thursday. Little did Chris and I know that Zoe actually threw up again Wednesday night, but got it entirely in the bowl we'd left by her bed. Clever little thing that she is, she hid the bowl because she didn't want to miss school again. When we found it on Friday, the girls tried to claim that the cats did it. Nevertheless, we were still thinking that we'd be able to make the trip to Michigan. And then Friday night happened. Around 11 pm, we heard Aaron start to puke. I ran into his room and cupped my hands in front of his mouth to try to catch the vomit. Because ...

A heptadecagon is a 17-sided polygon. Back in 1796, Gauss gave a proof of the constructibility by straight-edge and compass of a regular (all sides equal, all internal angles equal) heptadecagon. He liked the proof so much that he asked to have one carved onto his tombstone. According to the story, the engraver, telling Gauss that a heptadecagon carved on a stone would be essentially indistinguishable from a circle, declined. 196 years later, I took a class in Galois theory. Each of the five or six students in the class had to prepare a lecture on some mathematical topic relevant to the course material. My lecture consisted of working through Gauss's proof. I had always been a fan of geometry, but upon discovering the connections from straight-edge and compass constructions to algebraic equations, cyclotomic polynomials, and nth roots of unity, I felt as if I had just learned to do magic. At this point, those few readers who don't find me exceedingly tedious may wish...