Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From the NYT in January, a piece about Vi Hart (and her entertaining math doodling videos):

She calls herself a full-time recreational mathemusician, an off-the-beaten-path choice with seemingly limited prospects. And for most of the two years since she graduated from Stony Brook University, life as a recreational mathemusician has indeed been a meager niche pursuit.

It’s the portmanteau mathemusician.

(Hat tip to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky.)

A little more on Hart:

Then, in November, she posted on YouTube a video about doodling in math class, which married a distaste for the way math is taught in school with an exuberant exploration of math as art .

… She did another about drawing stars (really about geometry and polygons). Then another about doodling snakes (which segues into graph theory, “a subject too interesting to be included in most grade-school curricula,” she says). And another about prime numbers. (“Remember, we use prime numbers to talk to aliens. I’m not making this up.”)

Wait, there’s more. There are mathemagicians. From the Wikipedia entry:

A mathemagician is a mathematician who is also a magician.

The name “mathemagician” was probably first applied to Martin Gardner, but has since been used to describe many mathematician/magicians, including Arthur T. Benjamin, Persi Diaconis, and Raymond Smullyan. Diaconis has suggested that the reason so many mathematicians are magicians is that “inventing a magic trick and inventing a theorem are very similar activities.”

… A character in The Phantom Tollbooth is known only as “The Mathemagician.” He rules over Digitopolis, the kingdom of numbers. [link]

There are surely more: one ghit for mathemasochism and a number for mathemoron, for example. But none for mathemajorette, mathemaharishi, or mathemalachite.

This entry was posted on June 11, 2011 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Portmanteaus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.