Introducing Degrees of Freedom

I chose this beautiful artist’s rendition of Latin squres (a precursor of Sudoku) as the logo of my blog. Martin Gardner wrote about them in November 1959. His Mathematical Games column was often the cover story. Those were the days (Credit: Emi Kasai/Scientific American).

I started a new math and physics blog called Degrees of Freedom as part of ScientificAmerican.com’s new blog network, managed by Bora Zivcovic.

In the introductory post I talk about how I envision the blog and what it will be covering. Hyperlinks throughout the post bring you to past examples of my writing on math and physics.

In the first real post I describe a way of visualizing the cosmic microwave background (also known as the “afterglow of the big bang”) that I am sure is familiar to some cosmologists but that I have never seen written or heard described anywhere.

In the same post, I also point out that the sky used to be red before it turned black. That is also something I have not seen mentioned elsewhere.

I am not retiring sciencewriter.org though. I will still be posting here, either to add more context to articles I wrote (including posts on Degrees of Freedom itself), or to talk about things that would be off-topic there (including the occasional shameless self promotion).

As always, you can get updates by following me on Twitter at @dcastelvecchi.