Bubbles of fun….and the May winner is

Congratulations to Hugh for winning the May Cartoon Caption Competition. 

Click here to see the runners up

Hugh was inspired by the following mathematical discovery, in the making of this winning caption above and this other entry ‘Bill and Ben didn’t really understand the Double Bubble Conjecture, but they did throw themselves wholeheartedly into a practical demonstration.’

“When two round soap bubbles come together, they form a double bubble as on the right in Figure 1. Unless the two bubbles are the same size, the surface between them bows a bit into the larger bubble. The separating surface meets each of the two bubbles at 120 degrees. This precise shape is now known to have less area than any other way to enclose and separate the same two volumes of air, even wild possibilities as on the left in Figure 1, in which the second bubble wraps around the first, and a tiny separate part of the first wraps around the second. Such wild possibilities are shown to be unstable by a new argument which involves rotating different portions of the bubble around a carefully chosen axis at different rates. The breakthrough came while Morgan was visiting Ritoré and Ros at the University of Granada last spring. Their work is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Spanish scientific research foundation DGICYT.” (Link) Got nothing to do tonight? Why not read the paper?