PUNS (Haas Chances Emulation)

And now what next? A pun

William Hughes Mulligan to John D. Feerick

Letter from Fordham Law School Dean William Hughes Mulligan to Dean John D. Feerick, regarding his scholarly article on presidential inability.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/twentyfifth_amendment_correspondence/1022/thumbnail.jp

Extremely Luminous Water Vapor Emission from a Type 2 Quasar at Redshift z = 0.66

A search for water masers in 47 Sloan Digital Sky Survey Type 2 quasars using the Green Bank Telescope has yielded a detection at a redshift of z = 0.660. This maser is more than an order of magnitude higher in redshift than any previously known and, with a total isotropic luminosity of 23,000 L_sun, also the most powerful. The presence and detectability of water masers in quasars at z ~ 0.3-0.8 may provide a better understanding of quasar molecular tori and disks, as well as fundamental quasar and galaxy properties such as black hole masses. Water masers at cosmologically interesting distances may also eventually provide, via direct distance determinations, a new cosmological observable for testing the reality and properties of dark energy, currently inferred primarily through Type 1a supernova measurements.Comment: 8 pages including 1 figure; accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

Mortal Taste

In this lighthearted piece of mathematical fiction, the heroine/detective is a mathematician who traps her villain with a mathematician\u27s insight, subtlety, and rigor

John Cheever\u27s Story The Geometry of Love

Though John Cheever was a leading writer of short fiction, his story “The Geometry of Love” has received little prior literary or mathematical comment. In this essay it is read, against the background of Cheever’s own troubled life and marriage, as a Don Quixote – like search, explicitly following the model of Euclidean geometry, and at times wildly funny, for an ideal world of truth and happiness

Raphael\u27s School of Athens: A Theorem in a Painting?

Raphael\u27s famous painting The School of Athens includes a geometer, presumably Euclid himself, demonstrating a construction to his fascinated students. But what theorem are they all studying? This article first introduces the painting, and describes Raphael\u27s lifelong friendship with the eminent mathematician Paulus of Middelburg. It then presents several conjectured explanations, notably a theorem about a hexagram (Fichtner), or alternatively that the construction may be architecturally symbolic (Valtieri). The author finally offers his own null hypothesis : that the scene does not show any actual mathematics, but simply the fascination, excitement, and joy of mathematicians at their work

JHM Contents Word Puzzle

This is a word-search puzzle based on the contents page of the previous (Volume 4 Issue 1-January 2014) issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Intersection Cographs and Aesthetics

Cographs are complete graphs with colored lines (edges); in an intersection cograph, the points (vertices) and lines (edges) are labeled by sets, and the line between each pair of points is (or represents) their intersection. This article first presents the elementary theory of intersection cographs: 15 are possible on 4 points; constraints on the triangles and quadrilaterals; some forbidden configurations; and how, under suitable constraints, to generate the points from the lines alone. The mathematical theory is then applied to aesthetics, using set cographs to describe the experience of a person enjoying a picture (Mu Qi), poem (Dickinson), play (Shakespeare), or piece of music (Anna Magdalena Bach)