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MathDL NewsLoci presents the article, A Gallery of Ray Tracing for Geometers by Michael Grady. Here the author demonstrates tools that enable the creation of vivid and effective geometric constructions in 3-space. In a related article in Loci Developers, Creating Photo-realistic Images and Animations, Grady explains in detail the POV-Ray code necessary to generate the dodecahedron appearing in the Ray-Tracing article. Can you trisect a line with just two circles and three lines? Or with three circles and two lines? See how in the Loci article Trisecting a Line Segment (With World Record Efficiency!) by Robert Styer. There is also new supplement in Loci: The Kuratowski Closure-Complement Problem by Mark Bowron. Here the reader is invited to construct fourteen sets from one set in a topological space by repeatedly applying closure and complement in any order. (Fourteen is the maximum number that can be so generated.) This applet supplements the David Sherman article, "Variations on Kuratowski's 14-set Theorem," to appear in the American Mathematical Monthly, February 2010 (vol. 117, no. 2). Loci: Convergence reports the winners of the annual writing contest for undergraduate students in the history of mathematics sponsored by HOM-SIGMAA, the MAA special interest group on the history of mathematics. You can download copies of the winning papers. All the 2009 MAA award-winning papers (Allendoerfer, Chauvenet, Evans, Ford, Hasse, and Pólya Awards) are now available in the MAA Writing Awards site. Check out these outstanding articles and read brief biographical sketches of the award recipients. Come to a "Birds of a Feather" Meeting at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Francisco on Mathematical Knowledge Management and Digital Mathematics Libraries. The meeting, organized by Loci editor Tom Leathrum, will be held on Friday January 15 at 5:20 pm. See the Announcement for more details. Lang Moore |