God Plays Dice

James Stewart, author of calculus texts, has a 24ドル million house. It has lots of curved walls. Problem: find their areas or volumes, by integrating.

Simmons Hall, an MIT dorm opened in 2002, has a lot of oddly shaped rooms. (I found this silly, because the curved walls meant wasted space -- but I didn't live there, I just had friends who did, so it didn't bother me too much.) The story goes that the Cambridge fire department had trouble giving them a certificate of occupancy because they couldn't determine the volume of certain rooms and therefore couldn't determine whether they were adequately ventilated.

(Article from the Wall Street Journal; link from Casting Out Nines.)

Things we're not hearing about during coverage of Olympic swimming: apparently the construction of the "Water Cube" (the Beijing National Aquatics Center) is based on the Weaire-Phelan sturucture. More specifically, the Weaire-Phelan structure is apparently the best known solution to the problem of partitioning space into cells of equal volume with minimal suface area. The edges of the cells in this structure make up the steel frame of the building; in order to make a more "organic"-looking pattern the pattern was sliced at an oblique angle.

Somehow I missed this in the New York Times on Tuesday. See also the Guardian from 2004 and Science News a few weeks ago.

Updating a House of Tomorrow, by Eve M. Kahn in today's New York Times.
Theodore and Susan Pound recently bought a house in the Buckhead section of Atlanta designed by the architect Cecil Alexander. Most of the people who saw the house when it was for sale didn't much like it, because the rooms were oddly shaped; the house has a circular plan, which you can see a picture of in the article.
Alexander, when asked why the house was round, said:

My first plans were L’s or squares or rectangles [....] But then I realized those shapes waste so much space — a circle is compact, it gives you the maximum interior room for the minimum amount of exposed wall.

This is true; it's the well-known isoperimetric inequality. It's related to a lot of other geometric inequalities.

But I'm not sure that minimizing wall space is necessarily the way to go. My bedroom is round -- the corner I live on is an acute angle, and so whoever designed the building stuck on a round turret so the building didn't stick out into the intersection and stab people. Also, it's difficult to work with curved walls when you don't have curved furniture.

Finally, in a very dense neighborhood circular houses would waste land; there arinevitably holes between the houses, as in the picture below (taken from Wikipedia)
which take up about ten percent of the space. Atlanta's sprawling enough already; they don't need more wasted land, so they probably shouldn't start building neighborhoods of circular houses close together. However, the house in question is 5,500 square feet on four acres of land, so that's not a problem here.