Beyond Euclid #220
Welcome to Beyond Euclid #219, the newsletter for the best mathematics and science stuff of the week. I am Ali, and I curate cool math and science stuff every week to help you have a better week.
Hello from Beyond Euclid 220. Hope your week was good.
This one has geometry that earns its place, a 23-year-old who just broke a 60-year math problem with one ChatGPT prompt, negative time measured in a lab, a whale that the internet couldn’t stop watching, parents taking screens out of schools, a governor who spent children’s welfare money on his own campaign, and cherry blossoms from above.
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🐚 This piece by Rafael Araujo is pure math. A seashell, the golden ratio, a logarithmic spiral, dozens of geometric lines — all drawn by hand.
🔴 Edival Ramosa, 1971. Screenprint. Circle, semicircle, triangle, rectangle — lined up on a grid, purple orange green black. More than enough to prove geometry is gorgeous.
🧮 Liam Price is 23 years old with no advanced math training. One Monday afternoon he fed a 60-year-old unsolved Erdős problem into ChatGPT and it solved it — using a method nobody had ever tried before. Terence Tao and others looked at the result and confirmed that the AI had skipped the standard approach entirely and taken a completely different route.
📐 Helen Friel is a paper engineer who makes paper sculptures inspired by Oliver Byrne’s 1847 color edition of Euclid’s Elements. Euclid’s geometric proofs turned into three-dimensional forms in red, yellow, blue and black. Making math this beautiful is not easy.
⏱️ Physicists have measured negative time in the lab. In an experiment at the University of Toronto, a photon passing through a cloud of rubidium atoms exits earlier than it enters on average — meaning it was technically outside before it went in. This effect had been known for decades but always dismissed as a measurement artifact; in the new experiment, the atoms independently confirmed the same negative duration. Not a time machine, just standard quantum physics — but still enough to break your brain.
🖥️ Here’s something you don’t see every day. Someone turned a microwave into a gaming PC and the result looks genuinely original. The door became a screen, the turntable became a motherboard tray, the keypad became a Stream Deck; it’s running an Intel Core Ultra 5, RTX 5060 Ti and 48GB RAM. There’s a video, worth watching. You just can’t heat up food anymore.
🛰️ NASA’s Your Name in Landsat site spells out your name using satellite photos. River bends, mountain ranges, craters — images pulled from 50 years of Landsat archives turn into letters. Nice thing.
🪐 Trump’s NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman says Pluto should be a planet again. It was stripped of that status in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union, and has lived in millions of people’s hearts as a planet ever since. Isaacman told the Senate “I’m in the planet camp” and the topic went viral quickly. Scientists are still divided — some say if you can’t clear your orbit you’re not a planet, others say it has an atmosphere, five moons and active geology, so what more does it need. An official change would require the Union’s approval, which looks unlikely for now. But at least someone is speaking up for us. We want our Pluto back.
🔬 The Trump administration fired all 22 members of the National Science Board — the body that has guided the National Science Foundation and advised the president on science policy since 1950 — with no explanation given. Members were notified by email on a Friday, effective immediately. The majority were academics. The White House put out a statement saying NSF’s work continues without interruption. Without a board, of course.
🔬 Why now? According to El País, the board was days away from finalizing a report showing the US is losing its scientific edge to China. Investment is declining in the US while growing in China; some analyses suggest China could overtake the US within two years. Dismissed member Yolanda Gil doesn’t think the timing is a coincidence. The Trump administration is simultaneously trying to cut NSF’s $9 billion budget in half, 30% of staff are already gone, and the person nominated to lead a boardless NSF has a background in finance and investment.
🐦 A study covering 37 bird species across five European cities found that urban birds flee from women about a meter earlier than they do from men. Researchers ruled out hair length, height and weight differences but still couldn’t explain it; odor, gait and waist-to-hip ratio are still on the table.
🌸 Along the Shiroishi River in Miyagi, Japan, 1,200 cherry trees stretch for eight kilometers — “Hitome Senbon Zakura.” It draws 200,000 visitors during blossom season. Trains passing through slow down so passengers can take it in. The bird’s-eye video is something else.
🗼 A walk under Tokyo Skytree. Quiet streets, everyday life, natural light. You want to be there while watching it. I’ll get to Tokyo one day.
😴 According to a new CDC report, nearly a third of American adults sleep less than the recommended seven hours and only half wake up feeling rested. The 18–34 age group struggles the most; those 65 and older sleep the best. Women report more trouble falling asleep than men. Researchers put sleep in the same category as breathing and drinking water.
👤 This chart from Our World in Data, based on US data from 2010–2024, is striking. At 15 you spend about 4 hours a day alone; by 80 that’s 8 hours. Time with friends drops to nearly zero after your 20s, time with children peaks in your 40s and falls, and what’s left is loneliness and your spouse.
⚛️ The University of Utah is connecting its TRIGA nuclear reactor to a small AI data center this summer; the proof-of-concept experiment aims to convert heat that normally goes to cooling systems into electricity to power a GPU node. Output will be 2–3 kilowatts — far below what a real data center needs, but this is the first step toward testing whether small portable nuclear reactors could one day power data centers.
🐋 Timmy, a humpback whale stranded off Germany’s Baltic coast since March, was finally loaded onto a cargo ship and transported to the North Sea. The poor whale had run aground in shallow water repeatedly, and the rescue attempts were livestreamed for weeks. Scientists were divided — some argued the transport would cause severe stress, others pushed for it anyway. A Greenpeace marine biologist said “this animal came to shallow water to die, let it go.” The others didn’t listen. Timmy is in the North Sea now.
📵 Parents in the US are pushing back against technology in schools. The Los Angeles school board passed a resolution last week banning devices entirely through first grade and setting screen time limits for higher grades — making it the first major school system in the country to do so. In New York, parents protested against ChatGPT being introduced in schools. In Utah, a new law lets parents see which sites their kids visited on school devices.
🪸 Most sunscreens are damaging coral reefs. Research shows about 25% of applied sunscreen washes off while swimming — equivalent to 5,000 tons a year, roughly the weight of a thousand elephants. The widely used chemical oxybenzone can damage coral larvae at concentrations as low as 62 parts per trillion — one drop in six Olympic swimming pools.
🏛️ Florida Governor DeSantis spent over $36 million in public money — taken from sources including child protection programs and an opioid settlement fund — on his own political campaign during the 2024 elections. A joint investigation by the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald documented it. Both ballot measures he was fighting fell just short of the 60% threshold. The investigation is ongoing.
Always love getting these in my inbox!
reinstating Pluto might be the one thing this regime does that I actually approve of 🍸