Wedding Cake WIN

A few days ago while in a yarn shop I ran into one of our alumni from a few years ago.  Seeing her was fantastic, but the icing on the cake (Sorry.  Sort of.) was that she had gotten married last summer to a biochem major, and they designed their own wedding cake.  She sent me a couple photos the next day of what is perhaps the coolest wedding cake I’ve ever seen:

Here’s a detail:

Hey, I can answer that question!  I’m not as sure about the next one, though.

Congratulations (and Happy Anniversary!) to Emily and Glen — I can think of no better way to start a marriage.

Props to the photographer, Hilary Argentieri, for taking such clear picture!

Oddly, this isn’t even our first math wedding post (see this mathy proposal) although it’s the very first one involving cake.

 

Edited 9/19 to add:  Apparently this came from xkcd — I think that makes me like it all the more.

A complicated proposal

Matt Snyder and Tanya Hein are getting married this Saturday in Madison. No, I don’t know them, but I read about Matt’s proposal in this afternoon’s Wisconsin State Journal. They’d been dating a few years and were both ready to get engaged, but Matt decided to make it special. And nothing says special like a mathematical treasure hunt. The first key (to one of several locked drawers in a treasure chest) led to a coded message, which ended up instructing Tanya to drive to another location. There she found another key, which fit into another drawer, which had another puzzle in it. Each puzzle, when solved, instructed her to go to a different location where there was another key to another drawer that held — you guessed it — another puzzle.

Each location had a reason — the J.T. Whitney’s parking lot was the site of their first kiss. Some of the encrypted messages, involving complex letter codes, linear algebra and trigonometry, were highly difficult to solve.

Presumably there was no partial credit for getting close to a solution. But neither was there a time limit — this was no weekend jaunt. It took two months before Tanya finally got to the proposal. Her response was to give Matt an envelope with a puzzle inside to decipher.

I can only imagine what their seating chart will be.

Speaking of proposals, are there really a thousand yellow daisies in this scene (about a minute in)? It says there are, and estimation is not my own personal strength in mathematics, but it still seems to me that there’s actually quite a few more than that. Anyone know?

Math Miscellany

I was looking up math in the news today, and ran across a new blog/column on the Washington Post:  X=Why? Michael Alison Chandler is going back to high school at the age of 32 to take an Algebra II class and give her perspective.  She’s only posted one entry so far, but I’m curious about what her experiences will be, and if she’ll come away feeling any differently about mathematics.

At the end of that article she invites people to submit their best and worst word problems so I was searching around, and I came across a wedding message board in which a couple had decided to put word problems on everyone’s seating cards at the reception.  Guests would then have to solve the problems to figure out where to sit.

R and A have planned to depart Vancouver at 4:00 PM on Friday, September 12 to complete their honeymoon. Vancouver’s sunrise is 3 hours later than Boston’s. Their jet, which is carrying 132 passengers, travels at an average airspeed of 568 mph with an average tailwind of 32 mph. If Rob and Ashima’s plane arrives in Boston at 6:40 AM, how many thousands of miles apart are Calgary and Boston?

I totally wish I’d been invited to this wedding.