User Joseph O'Rourke - MathOverflow

Joseph O'Rourke

Member for 13 years, 11 months
Last seen this week

Twitter
cs.smith.edu/~jorourke
Northampton, MA, USA

702 Questions

Score Activity Newest Views

42 votes

2 answers

3k views

Can one "hear" the shape of a polygon via external reflections?

asked Apr 19, 2018 at 10:59

41 votes

6 answers

9k views

"Long-standing conjectures in analysis ... often turn out to be false"

asked Jul 25, 2018 at 23:03

41 votes

2 answers

2k views

Topple height of randomly stacked bricks

asked Oct 6, 2011 at 20:55

41 votes

6 answers

4k views

Measures of non-abelian-ness

asked Mar 25, 2013 at 0:16

41 votes

2 answers

2k views

Can we find lattice polyhedra with faces of area 1,2,3,...?

asked Apr 28, 2014 at 0:36

41 votes

5 answers

3k views

Which polynomial's roots are its coefficients?

asked Sep 3, 2015 at 15:00

41 votes

1 answer

1k views

Mod sequences that seem to become constant; and the number 316

asked Dec 26, 2014 at 15:07

39 votes

1 answer

6k views

Not all manifolds can be triangulated: In which dimensions?

asked Mar 11, 2017 at 0:52

39 votes

5 answers

3k views

Surfaces filled densely by a geodesic

asked Apr 14, 2013 at 13:02

38 votes

3 answers

4k views

Parabolic envelope of fireworks

asked Jul 3, 2010 at 12:50

37 votes

6 answers

3k views

Billiard dynamics under gravity

asked Aug 1, 2011 at 15:19

37 votes

2 answers

2k views

Can the unsolvability of quintics be seen in the geometry of the icosahedron?

asked Jun 9, 2013 at 12:44

37 votes

1 answer

2k views

Sofa in a snaky 3D corridor

asked Aug 5, 2016 at 23:45

36 votes

2 answers

4k views

Kervaire invariant: Why dimension 126 especially difficult?

asked Jul 1, 2012 at 0:52

36 votes

10 answers

6k views

Determining a surface in $\mathbb{R}^3$ by its Gaussian curvature

asked Oct 2, 2011 at 0:37

35 votes

3 answers

2k views

The kissing number of a square, cube, hypercube?

asked Dec 30, 2012 at 2:01

35 votes

7 answers

11k views

Fraktur symbols for Lie algebras

asked Feb 6, 2012 at 1:20

35 votes

5 answers

3k views

Tiling the plane with incongruent isosceles triangles

asked Oct 20, 2015 at 22:13

34 votes

6 answers

6k views

How to explain the concentration-of-measure phenomenon intuitively?

asked Jun 27, 2015 at 19:27

34 votes

6 answers

8k views

Covering a unit ball with balls half the radius

asked May 26, 2012 at 0:57

34 votes

34 answers

11k views

Titles composed entirely of math symbols

asked Jul 11, 2011 at 0:02

33 votes

2 answers

3k views

Functions whose gradient-descent paths are geodesics

asked Oct 18, 2010 at 11:15

33 votes

4 answers

3k views

Does there exist a shot in ideal pocket billiards?

asked Oct 31, 2010 at 1:25

33 votes

3 answers

5k views

Do bubbles between plates approximate Voronoi diagrams?

asked May 22, 2017 at 0:15

33 votes

4 answers

2k views

How many random walk steps until the path self-intersects?

asked Mar 10, 2019 at 3:01

32 votes

1 answer

1k views

Does projection of 3D points reduce distances by exactly 1/3?

asked Apr 9, 2017 at 14:25

32 votes

1 answer

1k views

Optimal sphere packings ==> Thinnest ball coverings?

asked Oct 7, 2016 at 14:22

32 votes

2 answers

2k views

Gently falling functions

asked Jun 18, 2011 at 0:49

32 votes

5 answers

1k views

Can every $\mathbb{Z}^2$ disk be pinball-reached?

asked Apr 20, 2013 at 1:03

31 votes

5 answers

8k views

How many binary operations are associative?

asked Oct 21, 2012 at 3:30

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