3D Printing the Big Letters in the JDRF Logo

The purpose of this short paper is to describe a project to manufacture a 3D-print of the big letters in the logo for JDRF (formerly known as the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation). The methods described in this paper involve processing the image of the logo through a Mathematica script, and the methods can be applied to most logos and other images that are sparse in the sense of not having many edges within the image. With the Mathematica script, a STereoLithography (.stl) file is created that can be used by a 3D printer. Finally, the object is created on a 3D printer. We assume that the reader is familiar with the basics of 3D printing.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

3D Printing A Pendant with A Logo

The purpose of this short paper is to describe a project to manufacture a 3D-print of a pendant that includes a logo. The methods described in this paper involve processing the image of the logo through a Mathematica script. These methods can be applied to many logos and other images. With the Mathematica script, a STereoLithography (.stl) file is created that can be used by a 3D printer. Finally, the object is created on a 3D printer. We assume that the reader is familiar with the basics of 3D printing.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Creating “Baseball Motion Graphs”

During 2013, I worked with a college baseball player from Oregon to create a video presentation using baseball statistics – RBIs, ERA, and payrolls. We were inspired by the videos of Hans Rosling to create “Baseball Motion Graphs”, using a free data visualization tool from Google. In this talk, I will explain how to use this tool to create animated data graphs. The baseball video can be found here: gvsu.edu/s/AP

Imitating the Shazam App with Wavelets

With the Shazam smartphone app, a listener captures a short excerpt of a recorded song with the smartphone\u27s microphone, and in a matter of moments the app reports the name of the song and the artist. Fourier analysis is a key mathematical tool that powers the app. In this paper, we describe a wavelet-based method that captures the basic process used by the Shazam app to search a database of number sequences (signals) to find those that are similar to a test signal. We will describe our implementation with a different source of signals: continuous glucose monitor data from the management of type-1 diabetes

Searching for tidal tails - investigating galaxy harassment

Galaxy harassment has been proposed as a physical process that morphologically transforms low surface density disc galaxies into dwarf elliptical galaxies in clusters. It has been used to link the observed very different morphology of distant cluster galaxies (relatively more blue galaxies with 'disturbed' morphologies) with the relatively large numbers of dwarf elliptical galaxies found in nearby clusters. One prediction of the harassment model is that the remnant galaxies should lie on low surface brightness tidal streams or arcs. We demonstrate in this paper that we have an analysis method that is sensitive to the detection of arcs down to a surface brightness of 29 B mag/arcsec^2 and then use this method to search for arcs around 46 Virgo cluster dwarf elliptical galaxies. We find no evidence for tidal streams or arcs and consequently no evidence for galaxy harassment as a viable explanation for the relatively large numbers of dwarf galaxies found in the Virgo cluster.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRA

3D Printing an Octohedron

The purpose of this short paper is to describe a project to manufacture a regular octohedron on a 3D printer. We assume that the reader is familiar with the basics of 3D printing. In the project, we use fundamental ideas to calculate the vertices and faces of an octohedron. Then, we utilize the OPENSCAD program to create a virtual 3D model and an STereoLithography (.stl) le that can be used by a 3D printer. Finally, the object is created on a 3D printer

3D Printing & the Artists Known As the Fauves

In this short, chatty paper, I describe how my attempt to use mathematics to create a 3D print of a school portrait led me a group of early 20th century French artists known as the Fauves