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Acknowledgments
The networking skills of Eugene Miya were especially helpful in bringing many choice examples to my attention, and I’ve also been helped by dozens of other people in casual conversations about the subject. Andrew Turnbull provided important historical information. David Bailey, Dave Bayer, Carol Bohlin, Laurence Brevard, David Eisenbud, Michel Goemans, Ron Graham, Victor Miller, Bill Ragsdale, and Cathy Seeley contributed photos. Gay Dillin of NCTM sent details of the 2005 contest. The four-author π photograph was taken by Raul Mendez. I found the PROF SVD image on Wikimedia Commons, where it had been posted by Da Troll.
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This column is a place for those bits of contagious mathematics that travel from person to person in the community, because they are so elegant, surprising, or appealing that one has an urge to pass them on.
Contributions are most welcome.
* This paper is based on the second author’s Clay Public Lecture at the IAS/Park City Mathematics Institute in July, 2004 Supported by the Clay Mathematics Institute Partially supported by NSF grant #DMS-9988459, and by the Clay Mathematics Institute as a Senior Scholar at the IAS/Park City Mathematics Institute
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Knuth, D.E. Mathematical Vanity Plates. Math Intelligencer 33, 33–45 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-010-9170-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-010-9170-7